THEBRIDEOF 
THE MISTLETOE 

JAMES LANE ALLEN 



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THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE BRIDE OF THE 
MISTLETOE 


BY 

JAMES LANE ALLEN 

AUTHOR OF “FLUTE AND VIOLIN,” “A KENTUCKY 
CARDINAL,” “AFTERMATH,” ETC. 


Nebj gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1909 

Ail rights reserved 



Copyright, 1909, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1909. Reprinted 
August, twice, September, October, November, 1909. 



Norfajoob 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co, 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 


TO ONE WHO KNOWS 


Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raisoner. 
Mais il faut regarder beaucoup et songer k ce qu’on a vu. 
Voir : tout est Ik, et voir juste. J’entends, par voir juste, 
voir avec ses propres yeux et non avec ceux des maitres. 
L’originalit^ d’un artiste s’indique d’abord dans les petites 
choses et non dans les grandes. 

Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n’a pas 
encore 6t6 d^couverte et tacher de Texprimer d’une fa 9 on 
personelle. 

— Guv DE Maupassant. 


vi 


CONTENTS 


Earth Shield and Earth Festival . 


I 


The Man and the Secret , 


II 


The Tree and the Sunset 


• • 


III 


The Lighting of the Candles • 

IV 


• • 


The Wandering Tale 




V 


The Room of the Silences 


^ VI 

The White Dawn 




PAGE 

. I 

. II 

• 39 

• 67 

• 93 

• 133 

• 151 


EARTH SHIELD AND 
EARTH FESTIVAL 












THE 

BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE 


EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL 

MIGHTY table-land lies southward 
in a hardy region of our country. 

It has the form of a colossal 
Shield, lacking and broken in some 
of its outlines and rough and rude 
of make. Nature forged it for some crisis in 
her long warfare of time and change, made use 
of it, and so left it lying as one of her ancient 
battle-pieces — Kentucky. 

The great Shield is raised high out of the earth 
at one end and sunk deep into it at the other. It 
is tilted away from the dawn toward the sunset. 
Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet. 
Nature, cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean 
flowing past with restless foam — the Father of 
Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound 
a bright river to the rim of silver. And where 
the eastern part rises loftiest on the horizon, 



4 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


turned away from the reddening daybreak, she 
piled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that 
loose their leaves ere snowflakes fly and with 
steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs through 
the gladdening and the saddening year. Then 
crosswise over the middle of the Shield, norths 
ward and southward upon the breadth of it, 
covering the life-bom rock of many thicknesses, 
she drew a tough skin of verdure — a broad strip 
of hide of the ever growing grass. She embossed 
noble forests on this greensward and under the 
forests drew clear waters. 

This she did in a time of which we know noth- 
ing — uncharted ages before man had emerged 
from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, 
thoughts to wander, heart to love, and spirit to 
pray. Many a scene the same power has wrought 
out upon the surface of the Shield since she brought 
him forth and set him there: many an old one, 
many a new. She has made it sometimes a 
Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace. 
Nor has she yet finished with its destinies as she 
has not yet finished with anything in the universe. 
While therefore she continues her will and pleas- 


Earth Shield and Earth Festival 5 

ure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not 
forget the Shield. 

She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which 
admonish man how little his lot has changed since 
Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon the shield of 
Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like 
a faJcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glitter- 
ing piece of armor to her angered son. 

These are some of the scenes that were wrought 
on the shield of Achilles and that to-day are 
spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky: 

Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze 
of lights as they lead the bride from her chamber, 
flutes and violins sounding merrily. An assembly- 
place where the people are gathered, a strife 
having arisen about the blood-price of a man 
slain; the old lawyers stand up one after another 
and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, 
freshly ploughed fields where ploughmen drive 
their teams to and fro, the earth growing dark 
behind the share. The estate of a landowner 
where laborers are reaping; some armfuls the 
binders are binding with twisted bands of straw: 
among them the farmer is standing in silence, 


6 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vine- 
yards with purpling clusters and happy folk 
gathering these in plaited baskets on sunny after- 
noons. A herd of cattle with incurved horns 
hurrying from the stable to the woods where 
there is running water and where purple- topped 
weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen 
with white sheep. A dancing-place under the 
trees ; girls and young men dancing, their fingers 
on one another’s wrists : a great company stands 
watching the lovely dance of joy. 

Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles 
as art; as pageants of life they appear on the 
Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of 
old wrought them upon the armor of the Greek 
warrior in tin and silver, bronze and gold. The 
world-designer sets them to-day on the throbbing 
land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and 
passion. But there with the old things she 
mingles new things, with the never changing the 
ever changing; for the old that remains always 
the new and the new that perpetually becomes 
old — these Nature allots to man as his two 
portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in 


Earth Shield and Earth Festival 7 

what he is and go upward or go downward 
through all that he is to become. 

But of the many scenes which she in our time 
sets forth upon the stately grassy Shield there 
is a single spectacle that she spreads over the 
length and breadth of it once every year now as 
best liked by the entire people; and this is both 
old and new. 

It is old because it contains man’s faith in his 
immortality, which was venerable with age be- 
fore the shield of Achilles ever grew effulgent 
before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new 
because it contains those latest hopes and reasons 
for this faith, which briefly blossom out upon the 
primitive stock with the altering years and soon 
are blown away upon the winds of change. Since 
this spectacle, this festival, is thus old and is thus 
new and thus enwraps the deepest thing in the 
human spirit, it is never forgotten. 

When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or 
sows in the teeth of the wind and glances at the 
fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a 
flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted 
herds and fattening grain; whether there is 


8 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


autumnal plenty in his bam or autumnal empti- 
ness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal 
strife, — all days of the year, in the assembly- 
place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever of good 
or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one 
forget. 

When nights are darkest and days most dark; 
when the sun seems farthest from the planet and 
cheers it with lowest heat; when the fields lie 
shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and 
man turns wistful eyes back and forth between 
the mystery of his origin and the mystery of his 
end, — then comes the great pageant of the winter 
solstice, then comes Christmas. 

So what is Christmas ? And what for centuries 
has it been to differing but always identical 
mortals ? 

It was once the old pagan festival of dead 
Nature. It was once the old pagan festival of 
the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival 
when the hands of labor took their rest and hunger 
took its fill. It was the pagan festival to honor 
the descent of the. fabled inhabitants of an upper 
world upon the earth, their commerce with com- 


Earth Shield and Earth Festival g 

mon flesh, and the production of a race of divine- 
and-human half-breeds. It is now the festival 
of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst 
of mortal children. It is now the new festival 
of man’s remembrance of his errors and his 
charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly 
become the widening festival of universal brother- 
hood with succor for all need and nighness to all 
suffering; of good will warring against ill will 
and of peace warring upon war. 

And thus for all who have anywhere come to 
know it, Christmas is the festival of the better 
worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is 
on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been 
through many an age to many people — the 
symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen ; setting 
forth man’s pathetic love of youth — of his own 
youth that will not stay with him ; and renewing 
his faith in a destiny that winds its ancient way 
upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal 
Light. 

This is a story of the Earth Festival on the 
Earth Shield. 


/I 




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THE MAN AND THE SECRET 


V 



I 


THE MAN AND THE SECRET 



MAN sat writing near a window of 
an old house out in the country a 
few years ago ; it was afternoon of 
the twenty-third of December. 

One of the volumes of a work 
on American Forestry lay open on the desk near 
his right hand ; and as he sometimes stopped in 
his writing and turned the leaves, the illustra- 
tions showed that the long road of his mental 
travels — for such he followed — was now pass- 
ing through the evergreens. 

Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the 
pages. They burned there like short tapers in dim 
places, often lighting up obscure faiths and cus- 
toms of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved 
from taper to taper, as gathering knowledge ray 
by ray. A small book lay near the large one. 
It dealt with primitive nature- worship ; and it 
belonged in the class of those that are kept under 
13 



14 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

lock and key by the libraries which possess them 
as unsafe reading for unsafe minds. 

Sheets of paper covered with the man’s clear, 
deliberate handwriting lay thickly on the desk. 
A table in the centre of the room was strewn 
with volumes, some of a secret character, opened 
for reference. On the tops of two bookcases and 
on the mantelpiece were prints representing scenes 
from the oldest known art of the East. These 
and other prints hanging about the walls, however 
remote from each other in the times and places 
where they had been gathered, brought together 
in this room of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse 
evidence bearing upon the same object : the sub- 
ject related in general to trees and in especial 
evergreens. 

While the man was immersed in his work, he 
appeared not to be submerged. His left hand 
was always going out to one or the other of three 
picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent 
caressingly. 

Two of these frames held photographs of four 
young children — a boy and a girl comprising 
each group. The children had the air of being 


The Man and the Secret 15 

well enough bred to be well behaved before the 
camera, but of being unruly and disorderly out 
of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of 
them looked straight at you; all had eyes wide 
open with American frankness and good humor; 
all had mouths shut tight with American en- 
ergy and determination. Apparently they already 
believed that the New World was behind them, 
that the nation backed them up. In a way you 
believed it. You accepted them on the spot as 
embodying that marvellous precocity in American 
children, through which they early in life be- 
come conscious of the country and claim it their 
country and believe that it claims them. Thus 
they took on the distinction of being a squad de- 
tached only photographically from the rank and 
file of the white armies of the young in the New 
World, millions and millions strong, as they 
march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnifi- 
cent, toward new times and new destinies for 
the nation and for humanity — a kinder knowl- 
edge of man and a kinder ignorance of God. 

The third frame held the picture of a woman 
probably thirty years of age. Her features were 


1 6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

without noticeable American characteristics. 
What human traits you saw depended upon what 
human traits you saw with. 

The hair was dark and abundant, the brows 
dark and strong. And the lashes were dark and 
strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily 
hedged about, somehow brought up before you 
a picture of autumn thistles — thistles that look 
out from the shadow of a rock. They had a 
veritable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray 
and of the fields, sure of their experience in nature, 
freighted with silence. 

Despite grayness and thorniness, however, 
you saw that they were in the summer of their 
life-bloom; and singularly above even their 
beauty of blooming they held what is rare in 
the eyes of either men or women — they held a 
look of being just. 

The whole face was an oval, long, regular, 
high-bred. If the lower part had been hidden 
behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little 
bank of snow which is guardedly built in front 
of the overflowing desires of the mouth), the upper 
part would have given the impression of reserve. 


The Man and the Secret 17 

coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that 
one look — the garnered wisdom, the tempering 
justice, of the eyes. The whole face being seen, 
the lower features altered the impression made 
by the upper ones ; reserve became bettered into 
strength, coldness bettered into dignity, severity 
of intellect transfused into glowing nobleness of 
character. The look of virgin justice in her was 
perhaps what had survived from that white light 
of life which falls upon young children as from 
a receding sun and touches lingeringly their 
smiles and glances; but her mouth had gathered 
its shadowy tenderness as she walked the furrows 
of the years, watching their changeful harvests, 
eating their passing bread. 

A handful of some of the green things of winter 
lay before her picture: holly boughs with their 
bold, upright red berries; a spray of the cedar of 
the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous 
blue. When he had come in from out of doors 
to go on with his work, he had put them there — 
perhaps as some tribute. After all his years 
with her, many and strong, he must have acquired 
various tributes and interpretations; but to-day, 
c 


1 8 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

during his walk in the woods, it had befallen him 
to think of her as holly which ripens amid snows 
and retains its brave freshness on a landscape 
of departed things. As cedar also which every- 
where on the Shield is the best loved of forest- 
growths to be the companion of household walls ; 
so that even the poorest of the people, if it does not 
grow near the spot they build in, hunt for it and 
bring it home : everywhere wife and cedar, wife 
and cedar, wife and cedar. 

The photographs of the children grouped on 
each side of hers with heads a little lower down 
called up memories of Old World pictures in 
which cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet 
of the heavenly Hebrew maid. Glowing young 
American mother with four healthy children as 
her gifts to the nation — this was the practical 
thought of her that riveted and held. 

As has been said, they were in two groups, the 
children ; a boy and girl in each. The four were 
of nearly the same age; but the faces of two were 
on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced 
at her again and persuaded yourself that the 
expression of motherhood which characterized 


The Man and the Secret 19 

her separated into two expressions (as behind 
a thin white cloud it is possible to watch another 
cloud of darker hue). Nearer in time was the 
countenance of a mother happy with happy off- 
spring ; further away the same countenance with- 
drawn a little into shadow — the face of the 
mother bereaved — mute and changeless. 

The man, the worker, whom this little flock of 
wife and two surviving children now followed 
through the world as their leader, sat with his 
face toward his desk in a corner of the room ; sol- 
idly squared before his undertaking, liking it, 
mastering it ; seldom changing his position as the 
minutes passed, never nervously ; with a quietude 
in him that was oftener in Southern gentlemen in 
quieter, more gentlemanly times. A low powerful 
figure with a pair of thick shoulders and tre- 
mendous limbs; filling the room with his vitality 
as a heavy passionate animal lying in a comer of 
a cage fills the space of the cage, so that you wait 
for it to roll over or get up on its feet and walk 
about that you may study its markings and get 
an inkling of its conquering nature. 

Meantime there were hints of him. When he 


20 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

had come in, he had thrown his overcoat on a 
chair that stood near the table in the centre of the 
room and had dropped his hat upon his coat. 
It had slipped to the floor and now lay there — a 
low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much worn 
by young Southerners of the countryside, — 
especially on occasions when there was a spur of 
heat in their mood and going, — much the same 
kind that one sees on the heads of students in 
Rome in winter; light, warm, shaping itself 
readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffed 
or donned as comfortable and negligible. It 
suggested that he had been a country boy in the 
land, still belonged to the land, and as a man 
kept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His 
shoes, one of which you saw at each side of his 
chair, were especially well made for rough-going 
feet to tramp in during all weathers. 

A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped 
to withdraw your interpretation of him from 
farm life to the arts or the professions. The 
scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against 
the clear-hued flesh at the back of his neck, and 
the Van Dyck-like edge of the shirt cuff, defining 


The Man a^id the Secret 


21 


his powerful wrist and hand, strengthened the 
notion that he belonged to the arts or to the 
professions. He might have been sitting before 
a canvas instead of a desk and holding a brush 
instead of a pen: the picture would have been 
true to life. Or more fitly, he might have taken 
his place with the grave group of students in 
the Lesson in Anatomy left by Rembrandt. 

Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair 
about, and began to read the page he had just 
finished: then you saw him. He had a big, 
masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal- 
looking, executive head — covered with thick yel- 
lowish hair clipped short; so that while every- 
thing else in his appearance indicated that he was 
in the prime of manhood, the clipped hair caused 
him to appear still more youthful ; and it invested 
him with a rustic atmosphere which went along 
very naturally with the sentimental country hat 
and the all-weather shoes. He seemed at first 
impression a magnificent animal frankly loved of 
the sun — perhaps too warmly. The sun itself 
seemed to have colored for him his beard 
and mustache — a characteristic hue of men’s 


22 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

hair and beard in this land peopled from Old 
English stock. The beard, like the hair, was cut 
short, as though his idea might have been to get 
both hair and beard out of life’s daily way; but 
his mustache curled thickly down over his 
mouth, hiding it. In the whole effect there was 
a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former 
student career in Germany, memories of which 
may still have lasted with him and the marks of 
which may have purposely been kept up in his 
appearance. 

But such a fashion of beard, while covering a 
man’s face, does much to uncover the man. As 
he sat amid his papers and books, your thought 
surely led again to old pictures where earnest 
heads bend together over some point on the human 
road, at which knowledge widens and suffering 
begins to be made more bearable and death more 
kind. Perforce; now you interpreted him and 
fixed his general working category: that he was 
absorbed in work meant to be serviceable to 
humanity. His house, the members of his family, 
the people of his neighborhood, were mean- 
time forgotten : he was not a mere dweller on his 


The Man and the Secret 23 

farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons 
where the race forever camps at large with its 
problems, joys, and sorrows. 

He read his page, his hand dropped to his 
knee, his mind dropped its responsibility; one 
of those intervals followed when the brain rests. 
The look of the student left his face; over it 
began to play the soft lights of the domestic 
affections. He had forgotten the world for his 
own place in the world; the student had become 
the husband and house-father. A few moments 
only; then he wheeled gravely to his work again, 
his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went 
back to the pictures. 

The silence of the room seemed a guarded 
silence, as though he were being watched over 
by a love which would not let him be disturbed. 
(He had the absolute self-assurance of a man 
who is conscious that he is idolized.) 

Matching the silence within was the stillness 
out of doors. An immense oak tree stood just 
outside the windows. It was a perpetual re- 
minder of vanished woods; and when a wind- 
storm tossed and twisted it, the straining and 


24 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


grinding of the fibres were like struggles and out- 
cries for the wild life of old. This afternoon it 
brooded motionless, an image of forest reflection. 
Once a small black-and-white sapsucker, circling 
the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark 
on a level with the windows, uttered minute notes 
which penetrated into the room like steel darts 
of sound. A snowbird alighted on the window- 
sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up 
its crest; but disappointed perhaps that it was 
not noticed, quoted its resigned gray phrase — 
a phrase it had made for itself to accompany the 
score of gray winter — and flitted on billowy 
wings to a juniper at the corner of the house, 
its turret against the long javelins of the North. 

Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the 
house-silence of a love guarding him within, the 
man worked on. 

A little clock ticked independently on the old- 
fashioned Parian marble mantelpiece. Prints 
were propped against its sides and face, illustrating 
the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples. 
Out of this photographic grove of dead things the 
imcaring clock threw out upon the air a living 


The Man and the Secret 25 

three — the fateful three that had been measured 
for each tomb and temple in its own land and 
time. 

A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and 
the door opening into the hall was quietly pushed 
open. A glow lit up the student’s face though 
he did not stop writing; and his voice, while it 
gave a welcome, unconsciously expressed regret 
at being disturbed : 

“Come in.” 

“I am in!” 

He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy 
— rather obsolete now — and bowing to one side, 
sat down again. 

“So I see,” he said, dipping his pen into his 
ink. 

“Since you did not turn around, you would 
better have said ‘ So I hear.’ It is three o’clock.” 

“So I hear.” 

“You said you would be ready.” 

“I am ready.” 

“You said you would be done.” 

“ I am done — nearly done.” 

“ But when entirely? ” 


26 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

to-morrow — to-morrow afternoon before 
dark. I have reached the end, but now it is hard 
to stop, hard to let go/’ 

His tone gave first place, primary consideration, 
to his work. The silence in the room suddenly 
became charged. When the voice was heard 
again, there was constraint in it: 

“There is something to be done this afternoon 
before dark, something I have a share in. Having 
a share, I am interested. Being interested, I am 
prompt. Being prompt, I am here.” 

He waved his hand over the written sheets 
before him — those cold Alps of learning; and 
asked reproachfully: 

“Are you not interested in all this, O you of 
little faith?” 

“How can I say, O me of little knowledge !” 

As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a 
quick movement behind him. He widened out 
his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked 
back over his shoulder at her and laughed. And 
still smiling and holding his pen between his 
fingers, he turned and faced her. She had ad- 
vanced into the middle of the room and had 


The Man and the Secret 27 

stopped at the chair on which he had thrown his 
overcoat and hat. She had picked up the hat and 
stood turning it and pushing its soft material back 
into shape for his head — without looking at 
him. 

The northern light of the winter afternoon, 
entering through the looped crimson-damask 
curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of the 
picture. 

Years had passed since the picture had been 
made. There were changes in her; she looked 
younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadder 
period of her life as human voyagers upon reaching 
quiet port repair the damages of wandering and 
storm. Even the look of motherhood, of the two 
motherhoods, which so characterized her in the 
photograph, had disappeared for the present. 
Seeing her now for the first time, one would have 
said that her whole mood and bearing made a 
single declaration: she was neither wife nor 
mother; she was a woman in love with life’s 
youth — with youth — youth; in love with the 
things that youth alone could ever secure to 
her. 


28 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and 
buoyant, brought before you a vision of growing 
things in nature as they move towards their summer 
yet far away. There still was youth in the round 
white throat above the collar of green velvet — 
woodland green — darker than the green of the 
cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen 
that color because she was going for a walk with 
him; and green would enchain the eye out on 
the sere ground and under the stripped trees. The 
flecklessness of her long gloves drew your thoughts 
to winter rather — to its one beauteous gift 
dropped from soiled clouds. A slender toque 
brought out the keenness in the oval of her face. 
From it rose one backward-sweeping feather of 
green shaded to coral at the tip; and there your 
fancy may have cared to see lingering the last 
radiance of winter-sunset skies. 

He kept his seat with his back to the manu- 
script from which he had repulsed her; but his 
eyes swept loyally over her as she waited. Though 
she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still 
less could she endure the silence. With her 
face turned toward the windows opening on the 


The Man and the Secret 29 

lawn, she stretched out her arm toward him and 
softly shook his hat at him. 

‘‘The sun sets — you remember how many 
minutes after four,” she said, with no other tone 
than that of quiet warning. “I marked the min- 
utes in the almanac for you the other night after 
the children had gone to bed, so that you would 
not forget. You know how short the twilights 
are even when the day is clear. It is cloudy 
to-day and there will not be any twilight. The 
children said they would not be at home until 
after dark, but they may come sooner; it may be 
a trick. They have threatened to catch us this 
year in one way or another, and you know they 
must not do that — not this year ! There must 
be one more Christmas with all its old ways — 
even if it must be without its old mysteries.” 

He did not reply at once and then not rele- 
vantly : 

“I heard you playing.” 

He had dropped his head forward and was 
scowling at. her from under his brows with a big 
Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for 
she held her face averted. 


30 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


The silence in the room again seemed charged, 
and there was greater constraint in her voice when 
it was next heard : 

“ I had to play ; you need not have listened.” 

“I had to listen; you played loud — ” 

‘‘I did not know I was playing loud. I may 
have been trying to drown other sounds,” she 
admitted. 

‘‘What other sounds?” His voice unexpect- 
edly became inquisitorial: it was a frank thrust 
into the unknown. 

“ Discords — possibly.” 

“What discords?” His thrust became deeper. 

She turned her head quickly and looked at 
him; a quiver passed across her lips and in her 
eyes there was noble anguish. 

But nothing so arrests our speech when we are 
tempted to betray hidden trouble as to find our- 
selves face to face with a kind of burnished, ra- 
diant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly 
close before a blaze of sunlight than the shadowy 
soul shuts her gates upon the advancing Figure 
of Joy. 

It was the whole familiar picture of him now — 


The Man and the Secret 31 

triumphantly painted in the harmonies of life, 
masterfully toned to subdue its discords — 
that drove her back into herself. When she 
spoke next, she had regained the self-control 
which under his unexpected attack she had come 
near losing ; and her words issued from behind the 
closed gates — as through a crevice of the closed 
gates : 

“I was reading one of the new books that came 
the other day, the deep grave ones you sent for. 
It is written by a deep grave German, and it is 
worked out in the deep grave German way. 
The whole purpose of it is to show that any w’oman 
in the life of any man is merely — an Incident. 
She may be this to him, she may be that to him; 
for a briefer time, for a greater time; but all 
along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him — 
an Incident. 

He did not take his eyes from hers and his 
smile slowly broadened. 

“Were those the discords?” he asked gently. 

She did not reply. 

He turned in his chair and looking over his 
shoulder at her, he raised his arm and drew the 


32 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


point of his pen across the backs of a stack of 
magazines on top of his desk. 

“Here is a work,’’ he said, “not written by a 
German or by any other man, but by a woman 
whose race I do not know : here is a work the sole 
purpose of which is to prove that any man is 
merely an Incident in the life of any woman. 
He may be this to her, he may be that to her; 
for a briefer time, for a greater time ; but all along 
and in the end, beneath everything else, he is 
to her — an Incident.” 

He turned and confronted her, not without a 
gleam of humor in his eyes. 

“That did not trouble me,” he said tenderly. 
“Those were not discords to me.” 

Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable 
searching. She made no comment. 

His own face grew grave. After a moment of 
debate with himself as to whether he should be 
forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he 
turned in his chair and laid down his pen as 
though separating himself from his work. Then 
he said, in a tone that ended playfulness : 

“Do I not understand? Have I not under- 


The Man and the Secret 33 

stood all the time? For a year now I have been 
shutting myself up at spare hours in this room 
and at this work — without any explanation to 
you. Such a thing never occurred before in our 
lives. You have shared everything. I have re- 
lied upon you and I have needed you, and you 
have never failed me. And this apparently has 
been your reward — to be rudely shut out at last. 
Now you come in and I tell you that the work is 
done — quite finished — without a word to you 
about it. Do I not understand?” he repeated. 
‘‘Have I not understood all along? It is true; 
outwardly as regards this work you have been — 
the Incident.” 

As he paused, she made a slight gesture with 
one hand as though she did not care for what he 
was saying and brushed away the fragile web 
of his words from before her eyes — eyes fixed 
on larger things lying clear before her in life’s 
distance. 

He went quickly on with deepening emphasis: 

“But, comrade of all these years, battler with 
me for life’s victories, did you think you were 
never to know? Did you believe I was never to 

D 


34 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

explain? You had only one more day to wait! 
If patience, if faith, could only have lasted another 
twenty-four hours — until Christmas Eve!’’ 

It was the first time for nearly a year that the 
sound of those words had been heard in that house. 
He bent earnestly over toward her; he leaned 
heavily forward with his hands on his knees and 
searched her features with loyal chiding. 

‘‘Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?” he 
asked, “its secrets for you and me? Think of 
Christmas Eve for you and me ! Remember !” 

Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day 
a smoke from a woodchopper’s smouldering fire 
will wander off and wind itself about the hidden 
life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the 
atmosphere near by is clear, there now floated into 
the room to her the tender haze of old pledges 
and vows and of things unutterably sacred. 

He noted the effect of his words and did not 
wait. He turned to his desk and, gathering up 
the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to cover 
her picture with them. 

“Stay blinded and bewildered there,” he said, 
“ until the hour comes when holly and cedar will 


The Man and the Secret 35 

speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; 
you will then see whether in this work you have 
been — the Incident.’^ 

Even while they had been talking the light of 
the short winter afternoon had perceptibly waned 
in the room. 

She glanced through the windows at the dark- 
ening lawn; her eyes were tear-dimmed; to her it 
looked darker than it was. She held his hat up 
between her arms, making an arch for him to 
come and stand under. 

‘^It is getting late,” she said in nearly the same 
tone of quiet warning with which she had spoken 
before. There is no time to lose.” 

He sprang up, without glancing behind him at 
his desk with its interrupted work, and came over 
and placed himself under the arch of her arms, 
looking at her reverently. 

But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung 
down at his sides — the hands that were life, the 
arms that were love. 

She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny 
hair and pass downward over his features to the 
well-remembered mouth under its mustache. 


36 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she 
dropped the hat softly on his head and walked 
toward the door. When she reached it, she put 
out one of her hands delicately against a panel 
and turned her profile over her shoulder to him : 

“ Do you know what is the trouble with both of 
those books?” she asked, with a struggling sweet- 
ness in her voice. 

He had caught up his overcoat and as he put 
one arm through the sleeve with a vigorous thrust, 
he laughed out, with his mouth behind the collar : 

think I know what is the trouble with the 
authors of the books.” 

‘‘The trouble is,” she replied, “the trouble 
is that the authors are right and the books are 
right: men and women are only Incidents to 
each other in life,” and she passed out into the 
hall. 

“Human life itself for that matter is only an 
incident in the universe,” he replied, “if we cared 
to look at it in that way; but we’d better not!” 

He was standing near the table in the middle of 
the room ; he suddenly stopped buttoning his over- 
coat. His eyes began to wander over the books. 


The Man and the Secret 


37 


the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey 
everything that he had brought together from 
such distances of place and time. His work was 
in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of lone- 
liness, came over him as it comes upon all of us 
who reach the happy ending of toil that we have 
put our heart and strength in. 

“Are you coming?’^ she called faintly from the 
hall. 

“I am coming,’^ he replied, and moved toward 
the door; but there he stopped again and looked 
back. 

Once more there came into his face the devotion 
of the student ; he was on the commons where the 
race encamps; he was brother to all brothers 
who join work to work for common good. He 
was feeling for the moment that through his hands 
ran the long rope of the world at which men — 
like a crew of sailors — tug at the Ship of Life, 
trying to tow her into some divine haven. 

His task was ended. Would it be of service? 
Would it carry any message? Would it kindle 
in American homes some new light of truth, with 
the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, 


38 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


and innumerable children of the future the better 
for its shining ? 

Are you coming ? ’’ she called more quiveringly. 

^‘1 am coming,’’ he called back, breaking away 
from his revery, and raising his voice so it would 
surely reach her. 


THE TREE AND THE SUNSET 



A 



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II 


THE TREE AND THE SUNSET 



HE had quitted the house and, hav- 
ing taken a few steps across the 
short frozen grass of the yard as 
one walks lingeringly when expecting 
to be joined by a companion, she 
turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the door- 
way for his emerging figure. 

“To-morrow night,’’ he had said, smiling at 
her with one meaning in his words, “to-morrow 
night you will understand.” 

“Yes,” she now said to herself, with another 
meaning in hers, “ to-morrow night I must under- 
stand. Until to-morrow night, then, blinded 
and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be ! 
Kind ignorance, enfold me and spare me ! All 
happiness that I can control or conjecture, come 
to me and console me !” 

And over herself she dropped a vesture of 
joy to greet him when he should step forth. 


41 


42 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors 
and to go about what they had planned; the 
ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, 
and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray 
cloud that betrayed no movement. Under this 
still dome of silvery- violet light stretched the winter 
land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great 
festival. 

The lawn sloped away from the house to a 
brook at the bottom, and beyond the brook the 
ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the 
distance you distinguished there the familiar trees 
of blue-grass pastures : white ash and black ash ; 
white oak and red oak; white walnut and black 
walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his rough- 
ness and the sycamore with her soft leoparded 
limbs. The black walnut and the hickory 
brought to mind autumn days when children 
were abroad, ploughing the myriad leaves with 
booted feet and gathering their harvest of nuts — 
primitive food-storing instinct of the human 
animal still rampant in modem childhood : these 
nuts to be put away in garret and cellar and but 
scantily eaten until Christmas came. 


The Tree and the Sunset 43 

Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded 
the muffled strokes of an axe cutting down a 
black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it 
would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, 
those white pearls of the forest mounted on 
branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would 
be gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house. 
Near by was a thicket of bramble and cane where, 
out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: 
the same fingers would be gathering that. 

Bordering this woods on one side lay a corn- 
field. The corn had just been shucked, and 
beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears 
ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the 
corn brought freshly to remembrance the red- 
ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a 
genial torrent through all days and nights of the 
year — in many a full-throated rill — but never 
with so inundating a movement as at this season. 
And the same grain suggested also the smoke- 
houses of all farms, in which larded porkers, 
fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors 
as home-cured hams ; and in which up under the 
black rafters home-made sausages were being 


44 Bride of the Mistletoe 

smoked to their needed flavor over well-chosen 
chips. 

Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown 
turkeys, red-mottled, rainbow-necked, were feed- 
ing for their fate. 

On the other side of the woods stretched a 
wheat-field, in the stubble of which coveys of bob- 
whites were giving themselves final plumpness for 
the table by picking up grains of wheat that had 
dropped into the drills at harvest time or other 
seeds that had ripened in the autumn aftermath. 

Farther away on the landscape there was a 
hemp-field where hemp-breakers were making a 
rattling reedy music; during these weeks wagons 
loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move 
creaking to the towns, helping to fill the farmer^s 
pockets with holiday largess. 

Thus everything needed for Christmas was 
there in sight : the mistletoe — the holly — the 
liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men — 
the hams and the sausages of fastidious house- 
wives — the turkey and the quail — and crops 
transmutable into coin. They were in sight there 
— the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be 


The Tree and the Sunset 45 

turned into oiffermgs to the dark solstice, 
the low activities of the soil uplifted to human 
joyance. 

One last thing completed the picture of the 
scene. 

The brook that wound across the lawn at its 
bottom was frozen to-day and lay like a band of 
jewelled samite trailed through the olive verdure. 
Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor 
spruce nor larch nor fir is native to these portions 
of the Shield; only the wild cedar, the shapeless 
and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage 
of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties 
of Nature; they had been planted. 

It was the slender tapering spires of these ever- 
greens with their note of deathless spring that 
mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape 
this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet 
light of the sky they waited in beauty and in 
peace : the pale green of larch and spruce which 
seems always to go with the freshness of dripping 
Aprils; the dim blue-gray of pines which rather 
belongs to far- vaulted summer skies; and the 
dark green of firs — true comfortable winter 


46 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

coat when snows sift mournfully and icicles are 
spearing earthward. 

These evergreens likewise had their Christmas 
meaning and finished the picture of the giving 
earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied no 
appetite, they were ministers to no passions ; but 
with them the Christmas of the intellect began: 
the human heart was to drape their boughs with 
its gentle poetry ; and from their ever living spires 
the spiritual hope of humanity would take its 
flight toward the eternal. 

Thus then the winter land waited for the on- 
coming of that strange travelling festival of the 
world which has roved into it and encamped gypsy- 
like from old lost countries : the festival that takes 
toll of field and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup 
and loaf; but that, best of all, wrings from the 
nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his 
fellows and builds out of his lonely doubts re- 
garding this life his faith in a better one. 

And central on this whole silent scene — the 
highest element in it — its one winter-red passion 
flower — the motionless woman waiting outside 
the house. 


The Tree and the Sunset 47 

At last he came out upon the step. 

He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though 
his first thought were of what the weather was 
going to be. Then as he buttoned the top button 
of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down 
over it to make it more comfortable under his 
short neck, with his other hand he gave a little 
pull at his hat — the romantic country hat ; and 
he peeped out from under the rustic brim at her, 
smiling with old gayeties and old fondnesses. He 
bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked 
so short under the flat headgear that her first 
thought was how slight a disguise every year 
turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and 
she smiled back at him with the same gayqties 
and fondnesses of days gone by. But such a 
deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and 
walked hurriedly down the hill toward the ever- 
greens. 

He was quickly at her side. She could feel how 
animal youth in him released itself the moment 
he had come into the open air. There was brutal 
vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen 
ground; and as his overcoat sleeve rubbed against 


48 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


her arm, there was the same leaping out of life, 
like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Half- 
way down the lawn he halted and laid his hand 
heavily on her wrist. 

“Listen to that!” he said. His voice was 
eager, excited, like a boy’s. 

On the opposite side of the house, several hun- 
dred yards away, the county turnpike ran; and 
from this there now reached them the rumbling 
of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out 
of the nearest town and moving toward smaller 
villages scattered over the country ; to its hamlets 
and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer or 
poorer — every vehicle Christmas-laden : sign 
and foretoken of the Southern Yule-tide. There 
were matters and usages in those American car- 
riages and buggies and wagons and carts the 
history of which went back to the England of 
the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; 
to the England of Elizabeth, to the England of 
Chaucer; back through robuster Saxon times to 
the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond this 
till they were lost under the forest glooms of 
Druidical Britain. 


The Tree and the Sunset 


49 


They stood looking into each other’s eyes and 
gathering into their ears the festal uproar of the 
turnpike. How well they knew what it all meant 
— this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How 
perfectly they saw the whole picture of the town 
out of which the vehicles had come : the atmosphere 
of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal 
pouring from its chimneys, so that twilight in it 
had already begun to fall ahead of twilight out in 
the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along the 
little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the de- 
light of window-gazing, mystery-loving children — 
wild with their holiday excitements and secrecies. 
Somewhere in the throng their own two children 
were busy unless they had already started home. 

For years he had held a professorship in the 
college in this town, driving in and out from his 
home; but with the close of this academic year 
he was to join the slender file of Southern men who 
have been called to Northern universities: this 
change would mean the end of life here. Both 
thought of this now — of the last Christmas in 
the house; and with the same impulse they turned 
their gaze back to it. 


50 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

More than half a century ago the one starved 
genius of the Shield, a writer of songs, looked out 
upon the summer picture of this land, its meadows 
and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out 
the spirit of an entire vineyard when he bursts a 
solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the song writer, 
drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into 
the notes of a single melody. The nation now 
knows his song, the world knows it — the only 
music that has ever captured the joy and peace 
of American home life — embodying the dim 
soul of it in the clear amber of sound. 

This house was one of such homesteads as the 
genius sang of: a low, old-fashioned, brown- 
walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys 
generous, with green window-shutters less than 
green and white window-sills less than white; 
with feudal vines giving to its walls their summery 
allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in 
the middle years of its strength and its honors; 
not needy, not wealthy, but answering Agar’s 
prayer for neither poverty nor riches. 

The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking 
back at it. 


The Tree and the Sunset 51 

It had been the house of his fathers. He had 
brought her to it as his own on the afternoon of 
their wedding several miles away across the 
country. They had arrived at dark; and as she 
had sat beside him in the carriage, one of his 
arms around her and his other hand enfolding 
both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through 
the forest trees — waiting for her with its lights 
just lit, its warmth, its privacies: and that had 
been Christmas Eve ! 

For her wedding day had been Christmas 
Eve. When she had announced her choice of a 
day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wil- 
fulness she had clung to it the more positively. 

^‘It is the most beautiful night of the year!’^ 
she had replied, brushing their objection aside 
with that reason alone. “ And it is the happiest ! 
I will be married on that night, when I am hap- 
piest !’^ 

Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered 
other words to herself — yet scarce uttered them, 
rather felt them : 

Of old it was written how on Christmas Night 
the Love that cannot fail us became human. 


52 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


My love for him, which is the divine thing in my 
life and which is never to fail him, shall become 
human to him on that night.’’ 

When the carriage had stopped at the front 
porch, he had led her into the house between the 
proud smiling servants of his establishment ranged 
at a respectful distance on each side; and without 
surrendering her even to her maid — a new spirit 
of silence on him — he had led her to her bed- 
room, to a place on the carpet under the chande- 
lier. 

Leaving her there, he had stepped backward 
and surveyed her waiting in her youth and love- 
liness — Jor him; come into his house, into his 
arms — his; no other’s — never while life lasted 
to be another’s even in thought or in desire. 

Then as if the marriage ceremony of the after- 
noon in the presence of many had meant nothing 
and this were the first moment when he could 
gather her home to him, he had come forward 
and taken her in his arms and set upon her the 
kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As 
his warm breath broke close against her face, his 
lips under their mustache, almost boyish then, 


The Tree and the Sunset 53 

had thoughtlessly formed one little phrase — one 
little but most lasting and fateful phrase : 

Bride of the Mistletoe 

Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood 
under a bunch of mistletoe swung from the 
chandelier. 

Straightway he had forgotten his own words, 
nor did he ever afterwards know that he had 
used them. But she, out of their very sacredness 
as the first words he had spoken to her in his home, 
had remembered them most clingingly. More 
than remembered them: she had set them to 
grow down into the fibres of her heart as the mistle- 
toe roots itself upon the life-sap of the' tree. And 
in all the later years they had been the green spot 
of verdure under life’s dark skies — the undying 
bough into which the spirit of the whole tree re- 
treats from the ice of the world : 

Bride of the Mistletoe 

Through the first problem of learning to weld 
her nature to his wisely; through the perils of 
bearing children and the agony of seeing some of 
them pass away; through the ambition of having 
him rise in his profession and through the ideal 


54 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


of making his home an earthly paradise; through 
loneliness when he was away and joy whenever 
he came back, — upon her whole life had rested 
the wintry benediction of that mystical phrase : 

Bride of the Mistletoe! ’’ 

She turned away now, starting once more down- 
ward toward the evergreens. He was quickly 
at her side. 

‘‘What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth 
are up to about this time?” he asked, with a 
good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant 
town. 

“At least to something mischievous, whatever 
it is,” she replied. “They begged to be allowed 
to stay until the shop windows were lighted ; they 
have seen the shop windows two or three times 
already this week: there is no great marvel for 
them now in shop windows. Permission to stay 
late may be a blind to come home early. They 
are determined, from what I have overheard, 
to put an end this year to the parental house 
mysteries of Christmas. They are crossing the 
boundary between the first childhood and the 


The Tree and the Sunset 55 

second. But if it be possible, I wish everything 
to be kept once more just as it has always been; 
let it be so for my sake ! ’’ 

‘‘And I wish it for your sake,” he replied 
heartily; “and for my purposes.” 

After a moment of silence he asked: “How 
large a Tree must it be this year?” 

“It will have to be large,” she replied; and she 
began to count those for whom the Tree this year 
was intended. 

First she called the names of the two children 
they had lost. Gifts for these were every year 
hung on the boughs. She mentioned their names 
now, and then she continued counting: 

“Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I 
make six. After the family come Herbert and 
Elsie, your best friend the doctor’s children. 
Then the servants — long strong bottom branches 
for the servants! Allow for the other children 
who are to make up the Christmas party: ten 
children have been invited, ten children have 
accepted, ten children will arrive. The ten will 
bring with them some unimportant parents; you 
can judge.” 


56 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

“That will do for size,” he said, laughing. 
“Now the kind: spruce — larch — hemlock — 
pine — which shall it be?” 

“ It shall be none of them !” she answered, after 
a little waiting. “It shall be the Christmas Tree 
of the uttermost North where the reindeer are 
harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts — 
fir. The old Christmas stories like fir best. Old 
faiths seem to lodge in it longest. And deepest 
mystery darkens the heart of it,” she added. 

“ Fir it shall be ! ” he said. “ Choose the tree.” 

“I have chosen.” 

She stopped and delicately touched his wrist 
with the finger tips of one white-gloved hand, 
bidding him stand beside her. 

“ That one,” she said, pointing down. 

The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens 
in summer gratefully, but now lying like a band 
of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near the 
middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; 
and on this island, aloof from its fellows and with 
space for the growth of its boughs, stood a perfect 
fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering fault- 
lessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it 


The Tree and the Sunset 57 

gathered more years — a tame dweller on the lawn 
but descended from forests blurred with wildness 
and lapped by low washings of the planet’s pri- 
meval ocean. 

At each Christmas for several years they had 
been tempted to cut this tree, but had spared it 
for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the 
thicket. 

“That one,” she now said, pointing down. 
“This is the last time. Let us have the best of 
things while we may ! Is it not always the per- 
fect that is demanded for sacrifice?” 

His glance had already gone forward eagerly 
to the tree, and he started toward it. 

Descending, they stepped across the brook to 
the island and went up close to the fir. With 
a movement not unobserved by her he held out 
his hand and clasped three green fingers of a low 
bough which the fir seemed to stretch out to him 
recognizingly. (She had always realized the 
existence of some intimate bond between him 
and the forest.) His face now filled with mean- 
ings she did not share; the spell of the secret 
work had followed him out of the house down to 


.58 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


the trees; incommunicable silence shut him in. 
A moment later his fingers parted with the green 
fingers of the fir and he moved away from her side, 
starting around the tree and studying it as though 
in delight of fresh knowledge. So she watched 
him pass around to the other side. 

When he came back where he had started, she 
was not there. He looked around searchingly; 
her figure was nowhere in sight. 

He stood — waiting. 

The valley had memories, what memories! 
The years came close together here; they clus- 
tered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant 
spots among them marked where the Christmas 
Trees of former years had been cut down. Some 
of the Trees had been for the two children they 
had lost. This wandering trail led hither and 
thither back to the first Tree for the first child : 
he had stooped down and cut that close to the 
ground with his mere penknife. When it had 
been lighted, it had held only two or three candles ; 
and the candle on the top of it had flared level 
into the infant’s hand-shaded eyes. 

He knew that she was making through the 


The Tree and the Sunset 59 

evergreens a Pilgrimage of the Years, walking 
there softly and alone with the feet of life’s Pities 
and a mother’s Constancies. 

He waited for her — motionless. 

The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley 
now. Only from the trees sounded a plaintive 
twittering of birds which had come in from 
frozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds 
of the boughs were calling to one another. It was 
not their song, but their speech ; there was no love 
in it, but there was what for them perhaps corre- 
sponds to our sense of ties. It most resembled in 
human life the brief things that two people, having 
long lived together, utter to each other when to- 
gether in a room they prepare for the night : there 
is no anticipation ; it is a confession of the uncon- 
fessed. About him now sounded this low winter 
music from the far boundary of other lives. 

He did not hear it. 

The light on the landscape had changed. The 
sun was setting and a splendor began to spread 
along the sky and across the land. It laid a 
glory on the roof of the house on the hill ; it smote 
the edge of the woodland pasture, burnishing with 


6o 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


copper the gray domes; it shone faintly on dis- 
tant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of 
the hemp at bivouac soldierly and grim. At 
his feet it sparkled in rose gleams on the samite 
of the brook and threw burning shafts into the 
gloom of the fir beside him. 

He did not see it. 

He did not hear the calling of the birds about 
his ears, he did not see the sunset before his eyes, 
he did not feel the fir tree the boughs of which 
stuck against his side. 

He stood there as still as a rock — with his 
secret. Not the secret of the year’s work, which 
was to be divulged to his wife and through her 
to the world ; but the secret which for some years 
had been growing in his life and which would, 
he hoped, never grow into the open — to be seen 
of her and of all men. 

The sentimental country hat now looked as 
though it might have been worn purposely to 
help out a disguise, as the more troubled man 
behind the scenes makes up to be the happier 
clown. It became an absurdity, a mockery, above 
hh face grave; stem, set of jaw and eye. He 


The Tree and the Sunset 


6i 


was no longer the student buried among his books 
nor human brother to toiling brothers. He had 
not the slightest thought of service to mankind 
left in him, he was but a man himself with enough 
to think of in the battle between his own will and 
blood. 

And behind him among the dark evergreens 
went on that Pilgrimage of the Years — with the 
feet of the Pities and the Constancies. 

« 

Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there 
was a slight noise on the other side of the tree; and 
his nature dutifully stepped back into its outward 
place. He looked through the boughs. She had 
returned and was standing with her face also 
turned toward the sunset; it was very pale, very 
still. 

Such darkness had settled on the valley now 
that the green she wore blent with the green of 
the fir. He saw only her white face and her white 
hands so close to the branches that they appeared 
to rest upon them, to grow out of them : he sadly 
thought of one of his prints of Egypt of old and of 
the Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her long back- 
ward-sweeping plume of green also blent with the 


62 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


green of the fir — shade to shade — and only the 
coral tip of it remained strongly visible. This 
matched the last coral in the sunset ; and it seemed 
to rest ominously above her head as a finger-point 
of the fading light of Nature. 

He went quickly around to her. He locked his 
arms around her and drew her close and held her 
close ; and thus for a while the two stood, watching 
the flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, 
leaving emptiness and ashes. 

Once she put out a hand and with a gesture 
full of majesty and nobleness waved farewell to 
the dying fire. 

Still without a word he took his arms from 
around her and turned energetically to the tree. 

He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made 
his way in close to the trunk and struck it with a 
keen stroke. 

The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed 
throat a sound like that of a butchered, blood- 
strangled creature trying to cry out too late against 
a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; 
the thousands of leaves were jarred by the death- 
strokes; and the top of it rocked like a splendid 

,vf 


The Tree and the Sunset 63 

plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then it 
fell over on its side, bridging blackly the white 
ice of the brook. 

Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set 
the butt-end on one of his shoulders and, stretching 
his arms up, grasped the trunk and held the tree 
straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing 
out of his big shoulder as out of a ledge of rock. 
Then he turned to her and laughed out in his 
strength and youth. She laughed joyously back 
at him, glorying as he did. 

With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to 
make it more comfortable to carry, he turned and 
started up the hill toward the house. As she 
followed behind, the old mystery of the woods 
seemed at last to have taken bodily possession of 
him. The fir was riding on his shoulder, its arms 
met fondly around his neck, its fingers were caress- 
ing his hair. And it whispered back jeeringly 
to her through the twilight : 

‘‘Say farewell to him! He was once yours; 
he is yours no longer. He dandles the child of 
the forest on his shoulder instead of his children 
by you in the house. He belongs to Nature; and 


64 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


as Nature calls, he will always follow — though 
it should lead over the precipice or into the flood. 
Once Nature called him to you: remember how 
he broke down barriers until he won you. Now 
he is yours no longer — say good-by to him ! 

With an imbued terror and desolation, she 
caught up with him. By a movement so soft 
that he should not be aware, she plucked him by 
the coat sleeve on the other side from the fir and 
held on to him as he strode on in careless joy. 

Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from 
the windows of the house: a servant was bring- 
ing in the lamps. It was at this hour, in just this 
way, that she had first caught sight of them on 
that Christmas Eve when he had brought her 
home after the wedding. 

She hurried around in front of him, wishing to 
read the expression of his eyes by the distant 
gleams from the windows. Would they have 
nothing to say to her about those winter twilight 
lamps ? Did he, too, not remember ? 

His head and face were hidden; a thousand 
small spears of Nature bristled between him and 
her; but he laughed out to her from behind the 
rampart of the green spears. 


The Tree and the Sunset 


65 


At that moment a low sound in the distance 
drew her attention, and instantly alert she paused 
to listen. Then, forgetting everything else, she 
called to him with a rush of laughter like that of 
her mischief-loving girlhood : 

Quick! There they are! I heard the gate 
shut at the turnpike ! They must not catch us ! 
Quick! Quick!” 

“Hurry, then!” he cried, as he ran forward, 
joining his laughter to hers. “Open the door 
for me!” 

After this the night fell fast. The only 
sounds to be heard in the valley were the minute 
readjustments of the ice of the brook as it froze 
tighter and the distressed cries of the birds that 
had roosted in the fir. 

So the Tree entered the house. 













THE LIGHTING OF THE 
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THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES 

TIRING the night it turned bitter cold. 
When morning came the sky was 
a turquoise and the wind a gale. 
The sun seemed to give out light 
but not heat — to lavish its splendor 
but withhold its charity. Moist flesh if it chanced 
to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter 
land the tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece 
of greased metal used as a trap and is caught and 
held there until the trapper returns or until it 
starves — starves with food on its tongue. 

The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farm- 
hand struck it, resisted as rock. In the fetlocks 
of farm horses, as they moved shivering, balls of 
ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little rough- 
nesses of woodland paths snapped off beneath the 
slow-searching hoofs of fodder-seeking cattle 
like points of glass. 

Within their wool the sheep were comforted. 

69 



70 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


On higher fields which had given back their 
moisture to the atmosphere and now were dry, 
the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and 
dragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The 
picture it made, being so ill-seasoned, led you to 
think of August drought when the grasshopper 
stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is 
hot in the nostrils and every bird holds its beak 
open and its wings lifted like cooling lattices 
alongside its breast. In these veils of dust swarms 
of frost crystals sported — dead midgets of the 
dead North. Except crystal and dust and wind, 
naught moved out there; no field mouse, no hare 
nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the naked 
trees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as 
unseen as the owl’s; about the cedars of the yard 
no scarlet feather warmed the day. 

The house on the hill — one of the houses 
whose spirit had been blown into the amber of 
the poet’s song — sent festal smoke out of its 
chimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant 
faces of children appeared at the windows, hang- 
ing wreaths of evergreens; or their figures flitted 
to and fro within as they wove garlands on the 


The Lighting of the Candles 71 

walls for the Christmas party. At intervals some 
servant with head and shoulders muffled in a 
bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from the 
house to the cabins in the yard and from the 
cabins back to the house — the tropical African’s 
polar dance between fire and fire. By every sign 
it gave the house showed that it was marshalling 
its whole happiness. 

One thing only seemed to make a signal of dis- 
tress from afar. The oak tree beside the house, 
whose roots coiled warmly under the hearth- 
stones and whose boughs were outstretched across 
the roof, seemed to writhe and rock in its winter 
sleep with murmurings and tossings like a human 
dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream. 
Imagination might have said that some darkest 
tragedy of forests long since gone still lived in this 
lone survivor — that it struggled to give up the 
grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame. 

The weather moderated in the afternoon. A 
warm current swept across the upper atmosphere, 
developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and 
toward sundown out of this cloud down upon the 
Shield snow began to fall. Not the large wet 


72 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


flakes which sometimes descend too late in spring 
upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those 
mournfuller ones which drop too soon on dim 
wild violets in November woods, but winter 
snow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes. 

It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all 
over the Shield. 

Softly the snow fell upon the year’s footprints 
and pathways of children and upon schoolhouses 
now closed and riotously deserted. More softly 
upon too crowded asylums for them: houses of 
noonday darkness where eyes eagerly look out 
at the windows but do not see ; houses of sound- 
lessness where ears listen and do not hear any 
noise; houses of silence where lips try to speak 
but utter no word. 

The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly 
on the old : whose eyes are always seeing vanished 
faces, whose ears hear voices gentler than any 
the earth now knows, whose hands forever try 
to reach other hands vainly held out to them. 
Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones gone 
with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve I 


The Lighting of the Candles 73 

But sadder yet for those who live on together 
after kindnesses have ceased, or whose love went 
like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to 
them ! Dark its snow and blinding ! 

It was late that night. 

She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a 
shaded lamp — the only light in the room. Her 
face, always calm in life’s wisdom, but agitated 
now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in 
toward her, rested clear-cut upon the darkness. 

She placed the lamp on a table near the door 
and seated herself beside it. But she pushed the 
lamp away unconsciously as though the light of 
the house were no longer her light; and she sat 
in the chair as though it were no longer her chair; 
and she looked about the room as though it were 
no longer hers nor the house itself nor anything 
else that she cared for most. 

Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging 
the presents on the Tree; but then an interrup- 
tion had followed : the children had broken pro- 
fanely in upon them, rending the veil of the house 
mysteries; and for more than an hour the night 


74 Bride of the Mistleioi 

had been given up to them. Now the children 
were asleep upstairs, already dreaming of Christ- 
mas Morn and the rush for the stockings. The 
servants had finished their work and were gone 
to their quarters out in the yard. The doors of 
the house were locked. There would be no more 
intrusion now, no possible interruption; all the 
years were to meet him and her — alone. For 
Life is the master dramatist: when its hidden 
tragedies are ready to utter themselves, every- 
thing superfluous quits the stage ; it is the essential 
two who fill it! And how little the rest of the 
world ever hears of what takes place between the 
two 1 

A little while before he had left the room with 
the step-ladder; when he came back, he was to 
bring with him the manuscript — the silent snow- 
fall of knowledge which had been deepening about 
him for a year. The time had already passed 
for him to return, but he did not come. Was 
there anything in the forecast of the night that 
made him falter? Was he shrinking from an 
ordeal ? She put away the thought as a strange 
outbreak of injustice. 


The Lighting of the Candles 75 

How still it was outside the house with the snow 
falling! How still within! She began to hear 
the ticking of the tranquil old clock under the 
stairway out in the hall — always tranquil, always 
tranquil. And then she began to listen to the 
disordered strokes of her own heart — that red 
Clock in the body^s Tower whose beats are sent 
outward along the streets and alleys of the blood ; 
whose law it is to be alternately wound too fast 
by the fingers of Joy, too slow by the fingers of 
Sorrow; and whose fate, if it once run down, 
never afterwards either by Joy or Sorrow to be 
made to run again. 

At last she could hear the distant door of his 
study open and close and his steps advance along 
the hall. With what a splendid swing and tramp 
he brought himself toward her ! — with what self- 
unconsciousness and virile strength in his feet! 
His steps entered and crossed his bedroom, 
entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he 
stood there before her in the parlor doorway, a 
few yards off — stopped and regarded iier in- 
tently, smiling. 

In a moment she realized what had delay^^^ 


76 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


him. When he had gone away with the step- 
ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind 
locked doors, he had been working all the after- 
noon at the decorations of the Tree. Now he 
came back ceremoniously dressed ; the rest of the 
night was to be in her honor. 

It had always been so on this anniversary of 
their bridal night. They had always dressed for 
it; the children now in their graves had been 
dressed for it ; the children in bed upstairs were 
regularly dressed for it; the house was dressed 
for it; the servants were dressed for it; the whole 
life of that establishment had always been made 
to feel by honors and tendernesses and gayeties 
that this was the night on which he had married 
her and brought her home. 

As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as 
never before how these anniversaries had not 
taken his youth away, but had added youth to him; 
he had grown like the evergreen in the middle 
of the room — with increase of trunk and limbs 
and with larger tides of strength surging through 
him toward the master sun. There were no rav- 
of married life in him. Time had merely 


The Lighting of the Candles 77 

made the tree more of a tree and made his youth 
more youth. 

She took in momentary details of his appearance : 
a moisture like summer heat along the edge of 
his yellow hair, started by the bath into which he 
had plunged; the freshness of the enormous 
hands holding the manuscript ; the muscle of the 
forearm bulging within the dress-coat sleeve. 
Many a time she had wondered how so perfect 
an animal as he had ever climbed to such an 
elevation of work; and then had wondered again 
whether any but such an animal ever in life does so 
climb — shouldering along with him the poise and 
breadth of health and causing the hot sun of the 
valley to shine on the mountain tops. 

Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed 
in her honor, thus but the larger youth after all 
their years together, would return her greeting 
with a light in his eyes that had always made them 
so beautiful to her — a light burning as at a 
portal opening inward for her only. 

His eyes rested on his manuscript now. 

He brought it wrapped and tied in the true 
holiday spirit — sprigs of cedar and holly caught 


y8 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

in the ribands ; and he now lifted and held it out 
to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems. 
Then he stepped forward and put it on the table 
at her elbow. 

'‘For you!’’ he said reverently, stepping 
back. 

There had been years when, returning from a 
tramp across the country, he would bring her per- 
haps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a brilliant 
autumn leaf for her throat. 

“For you 1” he would say; and then, before he 
could give it to her, he would throw it away and 
take her in his arms. Afterwards she would pick 
up the trifle and treasure it. 

“For you!” he now said, offering her the 
treasure of his year’s toil and stepping back. 

So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like 
a stone. She did not look at it or touch it but 
glanced up at him. He raised his finger, signal- 
ling for silence ; and going to the chimney comer, 
brought back a long taper and held it over the 
lamp until it ignited. Then with a look which 
invited her to follow, he walked to the Tree and 
began to light the candles. 


The Lighting of the Candles 79 

He began at the lowest boughs and, passing 
around, touched them one by one. Around and 
around he went, and higher and higher twinkled 
the lights as they mounted the tapering sides of 
the fir. At the top he kindled one highest red 
star, shining down on everything below. Then 
he blew out the taper, turned out the lamp; and 
returning to the tree, set the heavy end of the taper 
on the floor and grasped it midway, as one might 
lightly hold a stout staff. 

The room, lighted now by the common glow of 
the candles, revealed itself to be the parlor of the 
house elaborately decorated for the winter festival. 
Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls 
were garlanded; evergreen boughs were massed 
above the window cornices; on the white lace of 
window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, 
pressed and kept for this night, looked as though 
they had been blown there scatteringly by 
October winds. The air of the room was heavy 
with odors ; there was summer warmth in it. 

In the middle of the room stood the fir tree 
itself, with its top close to the ceiling and its 
boughs stretched toward the four walls of the 


8o The Bride of the Mistletoe 

room impartially — as symbolically to the four 
corners of the earth. It would be the only 
witness of all that was to take place between them : 
what better could there be than this messenger 
of silence and wild secrecy ? From the mountains 
and valleys of the planet its race had looked out 
upon a million generations of men and women; 
and the calmness of its lot stretched across the 
turbulence of human passion as an ancient bridge 
spans a modern river. 

At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just 
beneath at the first forking of the boughs a candle 
burned. A little lower down a cross gleamed. 
Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its 
pinions outstretched as though descending out of 
the infinite upon some earthly object below. 
From many of the branches tiny bells swung. 
There were little horns and little trumpets. 
Other boughs sagged under the weight of silvery 
cornucopias. Native and tropical fruits were tied 
on here and there; and dolls were tied on also 
with cords around their necks, their feet dangling. 
There were smiling masks, like men beheaded 
and smiling in their death. Near the base of the 


The Lighting of the Candles 8 1 

Tree there was a drum. And all over the Tree 
from pinnacle to base glittered a tinsel like golden 
fleece — looking as the moss of old Southern trees 
seen at yellow sunset. 

He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation 
of it. This year at his own request the decorations 
had been left wholly to him; now he seemed 
satisfied. 

He turned to her eagerly. 

“ Do you remember what took place on Christ- 
mas Eve last year?” he asked, with a reminiscent 
smile. ^‘You sat where you are sitting and I 
stood where I am standing. After I had finished 
lighting the Tree, do you remember what you 
said?” 

After a moment she stirred and passed her 
fingers across her brows. 

‘‘ Recall it to me,” she answered. “ I must have 
said many things. I did not know that I had said 
anything that would be remembered a year. 
Recall it to me.” She spoke bitterly. 

“You looked at the Tree and said what a 
mystery it is. When and where did it begin, how 
and why? — this Tree that is now nourished in 


82 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

the affections of the human family round the 
world.” 

‘^Yes; I remember that.” 

resolved to find out for you. I determined 
to prepare during what hours I could spare from 
my regular college work the gratification of your 
wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself 
find the way back through the labyrinth of ages, 
then I would return for you and lead you back 
through the story of the Christmas Tree as that 
story has never been seen by any one else. All this 
year’s work, then, has been the threading of the 
labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again, 
my work is finished, my gift to you is ready.” 

He made this announcement and stopped, leav- 
ing it to clear the air of mystery — the mystery of 
the secret work. 

Then he resumed : “Have you, then, been the 
Incident in this toil as yesterday you mtimated 
that you were? Do you now see that you have 
been the whole reason of it ? You were excluded 
from any share in the work only because you 
could not help to prepare your own gift ! That is 
all. What has looked like a secret in this house 


83 


The Lighting of the Candles 

has been no secret. You are blinded and be^ 
wildered no longer; the hour has come when 
holly and cedar can speak for themselves.” 

Sunlight broke out all over his face. 

She made no reply but said within herself: 

^‘Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has 
nothing to do with the trouble. The secret of 
the house is not a misunderstanding; it is life. It 
is not the doing of a year ; it is the undoing of the 
years. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happi- 
ness; it is a lesson that leaves me poorer.” 

He went on without pausing : 

“It is already late. The children interrupted 
us and took up part of your evening. But it is 
not too late for me to present to you some little 
part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a 
short story out of the long one. The whole long 
story is there,” he added, directing his eyes tow- 
ard the manuscript at her elbow; and his voice 
showed how he felt a scholar’s pride in it. 
“From you it can pass out to the world that cele- 
brates Christmas and that often perhaps asks 
the same question: What is the history of the 
Christmas Tree ? But now my story for you 1 ” 


84 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

“Wait a moment/’ she said, rising. She left 
the package where it was; and with feet that 
trembled against the soft carpet crossed the room 
and seated herself at one end of a deep sofa. 

Gathering her dignity about her, she took there 
the posture of a listener — listening at her ease. 

The sofa was of richly carved mahogany. 
Each end curved into a scroll like a landward 
wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms 
rested on one of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching 
beyond, touched a small table on which stood a 
vase of white frosted glass ; over the rim of it pro- 
fuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They 
were one of her favorite winter flowers, and he 
had had these sent out to her this afternoon from 
a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen 
messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson 
brocade swept down the wall to the floor from 
the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back 
were cushions of crimson silk. At the other 
end of the sofa her piano stood and on it lay the 
music she played of evenings to him, or played 
with thoughts of him when she was alone. And 
other music also which she many a time read: 
as Beethoven’s Great Nine. 


The Lighting of the Candles 85 

Now, along this wall of the parlor from window 
curtain to window curtain there stretched a 
festoon of evergreens and ribands put there by the 
children for their Christmas-Night party; and 
into this festoon they had fastened bunches of 
mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree felled the 
day before — they knowing nothing, happy chil- 
dren ! 

There she reclined. 

The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a 
rich blackness over which points of jet flashed 
like swarms of silvery fireflies in some too warm 
a night of the warm South. The blackness of 
her hair and the blackness of her brows con- 
trasted with the whiteness of her bare arms and 
shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat 
bared also. Not far away was hid the warm 
foam- white thigh, curved like Venus’s of old out 
of the sea’s inaccessible purity. About her 
wrists garlands of old family corals were clasped 
— the ocean’s roses; and on her breast, between 
the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, 
coral buds flowered in beauty that could never be 
opened, never be rifled. 


S6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two 
aged house-dogs — setters with gentle eyes and 
gentle ears and gentle breeding — had followed 
her and lain down at her feet; and one with a 
thrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from 
the toe of her slipper and rested his chin on it. 

‘‘I will listen,’^ she said, shrinking as yet from 
other speech. “I wish simply to listen. There 
will be time enough afterwards for what I have 
to say.” 

‘‘Then I shall go straight through,” he replied. 
“ One minute now while I put together the story 
for you : it is hard to make a good short story out 
of so vast a one.” 

During these moments of waiting she saw a new 
picture of him. Under stress of suffering and 
excitement discoveries denied to calmer hours often 
arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a 
shock that causes it to yawn and open its abysses : 
at the bottom we see new things: sometimes 
creating new happiness ; sometimes old happiness 
is taken away. 

As he stood there — the man beside the Tree — 
into the picture entered three other men, looking 


The Lighting of the Candles 87 

down upon him from their portraits on the 
walls. 

One portrait represented the first man of his 
family to scale the mountains of the Shield where 
its eastern rim is turned away from the reddening 
daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its 
central portions where the skin of ever living 
verdure is drawn over the rocks: Anglo-Saxon, 
backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, 
hewing and fighting a path toward the sunset for 
Anglo-Saxon women and children. With his 
passion for the wilderness — its game, enemies, 
campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This 
ancestor had a lonely, stern, gaunt face, no 
modem expression in it whatsoever — the time- 
less face of the woods. 

Near his portrait hung that of a second repre- 
sentative of the family. This man had looked 
out upon his vast parklike estates in the central 
counties ; and wherever his power had reached, he 
had used it on a great scale for the destruction of 
his forests. Woods-slayer, field-maker; working 
to bring in the period on the Shield when the hand 
of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the 


88 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


rifle, when the stallion had replaced the stag, and 
bellowing cattle wound fatly down into the pas- 
tures of the bison. This man had the face of 
his caste — the countenance of the Southern slave- 
holding feudal lord. Not the American face, but 
the Southern face of a definite era — less than 
national, less than modern; a face not looking 
far in any direction but at things close around. 

From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked 
down. He with his contemporaries had finished 
the thinning of the central forest of the Shield, 
leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie 
with remnants of woodland like that crowning 
the hilltop near this house. This immediate 
forefather bore the countenance that began to 
develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner 
after the Civil War : not the Northern look nor 
the Southern look, but the American look — a 
new thing in the American face, indefinable but 
unmistakable. 

These three men now focussed their attention 
upon him, the fourth of the line, standing beside 
the tree brought into the house. Each of them in 
his own way had wrought out a work for civiliza- 


The Lighting of the Candles 8g 

tion, using the woods as an implement. In his own 
case, the woods around him having disappeared, 
the ancestral passion had made him a student of 
forestry. 

The thesis upon which he took his degree was 
the relation of modern forestry to modern life. A 
few years later in an adjunct professorship his 
original researches in this field began to attract 
attention. These had to do with the South 
Appalachian forest in its relation to South Appa- 
lachian civilization and thus to that of the 
continent. 

This work had brought its reward ; he was now 
to be drawn away from his own college and 
country to a Northern university. 

Curiously in him there had gone on a corre- 
sponding development of an ancestral face. As 
the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into 
that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this 
had changed into the modem American face un- 
like any other; now finally in him the national 
American look had broadened into something 
more modern still — the look of mere humanity : 
he did not look like an American — he looked 
like a man in the service of mankind. 


90 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, 
presented itself to her as one wide vision of the 
truth. It left a realization of how the past had 
swept him along with its current ; and of how the 
future now caught him up and bore him on, part 
in its problems. The old passion living on in 
him — forest life ; a new passion born in him — 
human life. And by inexorable logic these two 
now blending themselves to-night in a story of 
the Christmas Tree. 

But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these 
forces something intensely personal to which she 
could cling ; and she did it in this wise. 

In the Spring following their marriage, often 
after supper they would go out on the lawn in the 
twilight, strolling among her flowers ; she leading 
him this way and that way and laying upon him 
beautiful exactions and tyrannies : how he must do 
this and do that ; and not do this and not do that ; 
he receiving his orders like a grateful slave. 

Then sometimes he would silently imprison her 
hand and lead her down the lawn and up the 
opposite hill to the edge of the early summer 
evening woods; and there on the roots of some 


The Lighting of the Candles 91 

old tree — the shadows of the forest behind them 
and the light of the western sky in their faces — 
they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their 
eyes from each other. 

The burning horizon became a cathedral in- 
terior — the meeting of love’s holiness and the 
Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil 
upon the low green hills ; wild violets were at their 
feet; the mosses and turf of the Shield under 
them. The warmth of his body was as the day’s 
sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair 
was to her like its tawny bloom, native to the sun. 

Life with him was enchanted madness. 

He had begun. He stretched out his arm and 
slowly began to write on the air of the room. 
Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his class- 
room when he was beginning a lecture; and it 
was thus, standing at the blackboard, that he 
sometimes put down the subject of his lecture for 
the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter 
and as he finished each word, he read it aloud to 
her: 

‘‘a story of the CHRISTMAS TREE, 

FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK” 



THE WANDERING TALE 


I 








« 




S 


♦ ' 

I 



I 



4 

t 


4 


' I 

f ■ 


. I 



1 

V . 

I • ' 

' ' ' * 



► 


IV 


THE WANDERING TALE 



70SEPHINE!” 

He uttered her name with 
beautiful reverence, letting the 
sound of it float over the Christ- 
mas Tree and die away on the 
garlanded walls of the room : it was his last trib- 
ute to her, a dedication. 

Then he began : 

‘‘ Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the 
study window a spring morning, I have watched 
you strolHng among the flowers of the lawn. I 
have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full 
bloom and question the blossoms in your question- 
ing way — you who are always wishing to probe 
the heart of things, to drain out of them the red 
drop of their significance. But, gray-eyed querist 
of actuality, those fragrant trumpets could blow 
to your ear no message about their origin. It 
95 


g6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

was where the filaments of the roots drank deep- 
est from the mould of a dead past that you would 
have had to seek the true mouthpieces of their 
philosophy. 

^^So the instincts which blossom out thickly 
over the nature of modern man to themselves are 
mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of the 
vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest 
outreach of life; and the point where it clamors 
for satisfaction is at the greatest possible dis- 
tance from its birthplace. For all these instincts 
send their roots down through the mould of the 
uncivilized, down through the mould of the primi- 
tive, down into the mould of the underhuman — 
that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies. 

“While this may seem to you to be going far 
for a commencement of the story, it is coming 
near to us. The kind of man and woman we 
are to ourselves; the kind of husband and wife 
we are to each other; the kind of father and 
mother we are to our children ; the kind of human 
beings we are to our fellow beings — the passions 
which swell as with sap the buds of those relations 
until they burst into their final shapes of conduct 


The Wandering Tale 


97 


are fed from the bottom of the world’s mould. 
You and I to-night are building the structures of 
our moral characters upon life-piles that sink into 
fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our 
drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majes- 
tically towards the sea and catch drops trickling 
from the springs of creation. 

“It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland 
of Old Desire, that my story lies for you and for 
me : drawn from the forest and from human nature 
as the two have worked in the destiny of the 
earth. I have wrested it from this Tree come out 
of the ancient woods into the house on this Night 
of the Nativity.” 

He made the scholar’s pause and resumed, 
falling into the tone of easy narrative. It had 
already become evident that this method of tell- 
ing the story would be to find what Alpine flowers 
he could for her amid Alpine snows. 

He told her then that the oldest traceable in- 
fluence in the life of the human race is the sea. 
It is true that man in some ancestral form was 
rocked in the cradle of the deep ; he rose from the 
waves as the islanded Greeks said of near Venus. 


98 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

Traces of this origin he still bears both in his 
body and his emotions; and together they make 
up his first set of memories — Sea Memories. 

He deliberated a moment and then put the 
truth before her in a single picturesque phrase : 

“Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the 
chambers of which the hues of the first ocean are 
still fresh and its tempests still are sounding.’^ 

Next he told her how man’s last marine ancestor 
quit one day the sea never again to return to the 
deep, crossed the sands of the beach and entered 
the forest ; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, 
soft to impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell 
to work, beginning to shape it over from sea uses 
to forest uses. 

A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the 
Forest worked at the sea-shell. 

It remodelled the shell as so much clay ; stood 
it up and twisted and branched it as young pliant 
oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron; tem- 
pered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as 
marble; painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned 
it as an instrument; lit it up as a life tower — 
the world’s one beacon: steadily sending it on- 


The Wandering Tale 


99 


ward through one trial form after another until 
at last had been perfected for it that angelic 
shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to 
sob and to smile. 

And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell 
had quit the sea and entered the forest, now on 
another day of that infinite time there reappeared 
at the edge of the forest the creature it had made. 
On every wall of its being internal and external 
forest- written ; and completely forest-minded: 
having nothing but forest knowledge, forest 
feeling, forest dreams, forest fancies, forest 
faith; so that in all it could do or know or 
feel or dream or imagine or believe it was forest- 
tethered. 

At the edge of the forest then this creature un- 
controllably impelled to emerge from the waving 
green sea of leaves as of old it had been driven 
to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters : Man at 
the dawn of our history of him. 

And if the first set of race memories — Sea 
Memories — still endure within him, how much 
more powerful are the second set — the Forest 
Memories ! 


lOO The Bride of the Mistletoe 

So powerful that since the dawn of history 
millions have perished as forest creatures only; 
so powerful that there are still remnant races on 
the globe which have never yet snapped the 
primitive tether and will become extinct as mere 
forest creatures to the last; so powerful that 
those highest races which have been longest out 
in the open — as our own Aryan race — have 
never ceased to be reached by the influence of 
the woods behind them ; by the shadows of those 
tall morning trees falling across the mortal clear- 
ings toward the sunset. 

These Master Memories, he said, filtering 
through the sandlike generations of our race, sur- 
vive to-day as those pale attenuated affections 
which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; 
these affections are inherited: new feelings for 
nature we have none. The writers of our day 
who speak of civilized man’s love of nature as a 
developing sense err wholly. They are like ex- 
plorers who should mistake a boundary for the 
interior of a continent. Man’s knowledge of 
nature is modern, but it no more endows him with 
new feeling than modern knowledge of anatomy 


The Wandering Tale loi 

supplies him with a new bone or his latest knowh 
edge about his blood furnishes him with an ad- 
ditional artery. 

Old are our instincts and passions about Nature : 
all are Forest Memories. 

But among the many-twisted mass of them 
there is one, he said, that contains the separate 
buried root of the story: Man’s Forest Faith. 

When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with 
the sea-shell, it had planted in him — there to 
grow forever — the root of faith that he was a 
forest child'. His origin in the sea he had not yet 
discovered; the science of ages far distant in the 
future was to give him that. To himself forest- 
tethered he was also forest-born: he believed 
it to be his immediate ancestor, the creative father 
of mankind. Thus the Greeks in their oldest 
faith were tethered to the idea that they were 
descended from the plane tree ; in the Sagas and 
Eddas the human race is tethered to the world- 
ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest 
faith sprang up and flourished: every race was 
tethered to some ancestral tree. In the Orient 
each succeeding Buddha of Indian mythology 


102 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

was tethered to a different tree; each god of 
the later classical Pantheon was similarly teth- 
ered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo to the laurel, 
Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno 
to the apple, on and on. Forest worship was 
universal — the most impressive and bewildering 
to modern science that the human spirit has 
ever built up. At the dawn of history began The 
Adoration of the Trees. 

Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from 
his dawn across the ages toward the sunset bear- 
ing within him this root of faith, it grew with his 
growth. The successive growths were cut down 
by the successive scythes of time; but always 
new sprouts were put forth. 

Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine 
dwelt as a bodily presence within the forest; but 
one final day the forest lost the Immortal as its 
indwelling creator. 

Next the old forest worshipper peopled the 
trees with an intermediate race of sylvan deities 
less than divine, more than human; and long he 
beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and prox- 
imity of these; but the lesser could not maintain 


The Wandering Tale 


103 


themselves in temples from which the greater 
had already been expelled, and they too passed 
out of sight down the roadway of the world. 

Still the old forest faith would not let the wan- 
derer rest ; and during yet later ages he sent into 
the trees his own nature so that the woods became 
freshly endeared to him by many a story of how 
individuals of his own race had succeeded as 
tenants to the erstwhile habitations of the gods. 
Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, 
and civilized man stood face to face with the 
modern woods — inhabitated only by its sap 
and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close 
around them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across 
those portals through which so many a stranger 
to them had passed in and passed out ; and hence- 
forth the dubious oracle of the forest — its one 
reply to all man’s questionings — became the 
Voice of its own Mystery. 

After this the forest worshipper could worship 
the woods no more. But we must not forget that 
civilization as compared with the duration of 
human life on the planet began but yesterday: 
even our own Indo-European race dwells as it 


104 Bride of the Mistletoe 

were on the forest edge. And the forest still 
reaches out and twines itself around our deepest 
spiritual truths : home — birth — love — prayer — 
death: it tries to overrun them all, to reclaim 
them. Thus when we build our houses, instinc- 
tively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide 
them and to shelter ourselves once more inside 
the forest; in some countries whenever a child 
is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature ; 
in our marriage customs the forest still riots as 
master of ceremonies with garlands and fruits; 
our prayers strike against the forest shaped in 
cathedral stone — memory of the grove, God’s 
first temple; and when we die, it is the tree that 
is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest. 
Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses 
some obscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken. 

Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man 
has anywhere reared for his spirit, over the walls 
of it have been found growing the same leaf and 
tendril: he has introduced the tree into the 
ritual of every later world- worship ; and thus he 
has introduced the evergreen into the ritual of 
Christianity. 


The Wandering Tale 


105 


This then is the meaning of the Christmas 
Tree and of its presence at the Nativity. At the 
dawn of history we behold man worshipping the 
tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; 
in our time we see him using that tree in the 
worship of the creative Father’s Son come to 
earth in the Father’s stead. 

“On this evergreen in the room falls the 
radiance of these brief tapers of the night; but 
on it rests also the long light of that spiritual 
dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees. 
It is the forest taking its place once more beside 
the long-lost Immortal.” 

Here he finished the first part of his story. That 
he should address her thus and that she thus should 
listen had in it nothing unusual for them. For 
years it had been his wont to traverse with her the 
ground of his lectures, and she shared his thought 
before it reached others. It was their high and 
equal comradeship. Wherever his mind could go 
hers went — a brilliant torch, a warming sym- 
pathy. 

But to-night his words had fallen on her as 
withered leaves on a motionless figure of stone. 


io6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

If he was sensible of this change in her, he gave 
no sign. And after a moment he passed to the 
remaining part of the story. 

“Thus far I have been speaking to you of the 
bare tree in wild nature: here it is loaded with 
decorations ; and now I want to show you that they 
too are Forest Memories — that since the ever- 
green moved over into the service of Christianity, 
one by one like a flock of birds these Forest Mem- 
ories have followed it and have alighted amid its 
branches. Everything here has its story. I am 
going to tell you in each case what that story is; 
I am going to interpret everything on the Christ- 
mas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in 
the room.” 

It was at this point that her keen attention 
became fixed on him and never afterwards 
wavered. If everything had its story, the mistle- 
toe would have its ; he must interpret that : and 
thus he himself unexpectedly had brought about 
the situation she wished. She would meet him 
at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the 
Judgment of the Years! And now as one sits 
down at some point of a road where a traveller 
must arrive, she waited for him there. 


The Wandering Tale 107 

He turned to the Tree and explained briefly 
that as soon as the forest worshipper began the 
worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his 
offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for 
religion consists in offering something: to wor- 
ship is to give. In after ages when man had 
learned to build shrines and temples, he still 
kept up his primitive custom of bringing to the 
altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during that im- 
measurable time before he had learned to carve 
wood or to set one stone on another, he was bring- 
ing his offerings to the grove — the only cathedral 
he had. And this to him was not decoration; 
it was prayer. So that in our age of the world 
when we playfully decorate the Christmas Tree it 
is a survival of grave rites in the worship of primi- 
tive man and is as ancient as forest worship 
itself. 

And now he began. 

With the pointer in his hand he touched the 
star at the apex of the fir. This, he said, was 
commonly understood to represent the Star of 
Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the 
East to the manger on the Night of the Nativity — 


io8 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

the Star of the New Born. But modern dis- 
coveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea 
go back four or five thousand years before the 
Christian era; and as far back as they have been 
traced, we find the wise men of the East worship- 
ping this same star and being guided by it in their 
spiritual wanderings as they searched for the in- 
carnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as 
the star of peace and goodness and purity. Many 
a pious Wolfram in those dim centuries no doubt 
sang his evening hymn to the same star, for love 
of some Chaldean Elizabeth — both he and she 
blown about the desert how many centuries now 
as dust. Moreover on these records the star and 
the Tree are brought together as here side by side. 
And the story of the star leads backward to one 
of the first things that man ever worshipped as 
he looked beyond the forest: the light of the 
heavens floating in the depth of space — light that 
he wanted but could not grasp. 

He touched the next object on the Tree — the 
candle under the star — and went on : 

Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at 
the end of ages having caught this light — having 


The Wandering Tale 109 

brought it down in the language of his myth from 
heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in 
space as having become a star in his hand — the 
candle : the star worshipper had now become also 
the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back 
to the fire worshippers of ancient Persia — those 
highlands of the spirit seeking light. We think 
of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely 
borrowed from the candle of the altar for the 
purpose of illumination; but the use of it goes 
back to a time when the forest worshipper, now 
also the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the 
trees, having no other altar. Far down toward 
modern times the temples of the Old Prussians, 
for example, were oak groves, and among them 
a hierarchy of priests was ordained to keep the 
sacred fire perpetually burning at the root of the 
sacred oak. 

He touched the third object on the tree — the 
cross under the candle — and went on : 

“To the Christian believer the cross signifies 
one supreme event: Calvary and the tragedy of 
the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw and 
the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But 


no The Bride of the Mistletoe 

no one in that age thought of the cross as a Chris- 
tian symbol. John and Peter and Paul and the 
rest went down into their graves without so regard- 
ing it. The Magdalene never clung to it with 
life-tired arms, nor poured out at the foot of it 
the benizon of her tears. Not until the third 
century after Christ did the Bishops assembled at 
Nice announce it a Christian symbol. But it was 
a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of 
Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred 
light and fire of life which was himself. For he 
himself is a cross — the first cross he has ever 
known. The faithful may truly think of the Son 
of Man as crucified as the image of humanity. 
And thus ages before Christ, cross worship and 
forest worship were brought together: for in- 
stance, among the Druids who hunted for an 
oak, two boughs of which made with the trunk 
of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these 
three they cut the names of three of their gods 
and this was holy-cross wood.” 

He moved the pointer down until he touched 
the fourth object on the tree — the dove under the 
cross, and went on : 


The Wandering Tale iii 

^‘In the mind of the Christian believer this rep- 
resents the white dove of the New Testament 
which descended on the Son of Man when the 
heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white 
dove descends, overshadowing the Grail. But 
ages before Christ the prolific white dove of Syria 
was worshipped throughout the Orient as the 
symbol of reproductive Nature: and to this day 
the Almighty is there believed to manifest himself 
under this formr In ancient Mesopotamia the 
divine mother of nature is often represented with 
this dove as having actually alighted on her 
shoulder or in her open hand. And here again 
forest worship early became associated with the 
worship of the dove; for, sixteen hundred years 
before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in the 
oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an 
augury and its wings an omen.^’ 

On he went, touching one thing after another, 
tracing the story of each backward till it was 
lost in antiquity and showing how each was en- 
twined with forest worship. 

He touched the musical instruments; the bell, 
the drum. The bell, he said, was used in Greece 


1 1 2 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of the 
vine. And vine worship was forest worship. 
Moreover, in the same oak grove at Dodona bells 
were tied to the oak boughs and their tinklings 
also were sacred auguries. The drum, which 
the modern boy beats on Christmas Day, was 
beaten ages before Christ in the worship of 
Confucius : the story of it dies away toward what 
was man’s first written music in forgotten China. 
In the first century of the Christian era, on one of 
the most splendid of the old Buddhist sculptures, 
boys are represented as beating the drum in the 
worship of the sacred tree — once more showing 
how music passed into the service of forest faith. 

He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its 
story back to the ram’s horn — the primitive cup 
of 'libation, used for a drinking cup and used also 
to pour out the last product of the vine in honor 
of the vine itself — the forest’s first goblet. 

He touched the fruits and the flowers on the 
Tree: these were oldest of all, perhaps, he said; 
for before the forest worshipper had learned to 
shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he 
could at least bring to the divine tree and hang 


The Wandering Tale 113 

on it the flower of spring, the wild fruit of 
autumn. 

He kept on until only three things on the Tree 
were left uninterpreted ; the tinsel, the masks, and 
the dolls. He told her that he had left these to the 
last for a reason: seemingly they were the most 
trivial but really the most grave ; for by means 
of them most clearly could be traced the pres- 
ence of great law running through the progress of 
humanity. 

He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered 
the tree, draping it like a yellow moss. It was of 
no value, he said, but in the course of ages it had 
taken the place of the offering of actual gold 
in forest worship: a once universal custom of 
adorning the tree with everything most precious 
to the giver in token of his sacrifice and self- 
sacrifice. Even in Jeremiah is an account of the 
lading of the sacred tree with gold and ornaments. 
Herodotus relates that when Xerxes was invading 
Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had 
it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy 
narrates that when Romulus slew his enemy on the 
site of the Eternal City, he hung rich spoils on the 


1 14 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of 
decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in 
history until we can meet it coming down to us in 
the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece and 
in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. 
Now the custom has dwindled to this tinsel flung 
over the Christmas Tree — the mock sacrifice 
for the real. 

He touched the masks and unfolded the grim 
story that lay behind their mockery. It led back 
to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing 
prisoners of war or condemned criminals or inno- 
cent victims in forest worship and of hanging their 
heads on the branches: we know this to have 
been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. 
In the course of time, when such barbarity could 
be tolerated no longer, the mock countenance 
replaced the real. 

He touched the dolls and revealed their sad 
story. Like the others, its long path led to an- 
tiquity and to the custom of sacrificing children 
in forest worship. How common this custom was 
the early literature of the human race too abun- 
dantly testifies. We encounter the trace of it in 


The Wandering Tale 115 

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac — arrested by the 
command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never 
have thought of slaying his son to propitiate his 
God, had not the custom been well established. 
In the case of Jephthah’s daughter the sacrifice 
was actually allowed. We come upon the same 
custom in the fate of Iphigenia — at a critical 
turning point in the world’s mercy; in her stead 
the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac’s case, was 
accepted. When the protective charity of man- 
kind turned against the inhumanity of the old 
faiths, then the substitution of the mock for the 
real sacrifice became complete. And now on the 
boughs of the Christmas Tree where richly we come 
upon vestiges of primitive rites only these playful 
toys are left to suggest the massacre of the innocent. 

He had covered the ground; everything had 
yielded its story. All the little stories, like path- 
ways running backward into the distance and 
ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; 
they met in forest worship and they met in some 
sacrifice by the human heart. 

And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson 
of the night : 


Ii6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

^‘Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and 
for me. The Christmas Tree is all that is left of a 
forest memory. The forest worshipper could not 
worship without giving, because to worship is to 
give : therefore he brought his gifts to the forest — 
his first altar. These gifts, remember, were never, 
as with us, decorations. They were his sacrifices 
and self-sacrifices. ’ In all the religions he has had 
since, the same law lives. In his lower religions 
he has sacrificed the better to the worse; in the 
higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to the 
best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion 
whatsoever, it would still have to worship what is 
highest in human nature and so worshipping, it 
would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice 
become the law of self-sacrifice : it would still be 
necessary to offer up what is low in us to what is 
higher. Only one portion of mankind has ever 
believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has 
known its own Calvary.’’ 

He turned away from the Tree toward her and 
awaited her appreciation. She had sat watching 
him without a movement and without a word. 
But when at last she asked him a question, she 


The Wandering Tale iiy 

spoke as a listener who wakens from a long 
revery. 

“Have you finished the story for me?” she 
inquired. 

“I have finished the story for you,” he replied 
without betraying disappointment at her icy re- 
ception of it. 

Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white 
arms above her head, turning her face up also 
until the swanlike curve of the white throat 
showed ; and with quivering finger tips she touched 
some sprays of mistletoe pendent from the garland 
on the wall : 

“You have not interpreted this,” she said, her 
mind fixed on that sole omission. 

“I have not explained that,” he admitted. 

She sat up, and for the first time looked with 
intense interest toward the manuscript on the 
table across the room. 

“Have you explained it there?” 

“I have not explained it there.” 

“But why?” she said with disappointment. 

“ I did not wish you to read that story, 
Josephine.” 


Ii8 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

“But why, Frederick?^’ she inquired, startled 
into wonderment. 

He smiled : “ If I told you why, I might as well 
tell you the story. 

“But why do you not wish to tell me the story ? 

He answered with warning frankness: “If you 
once saw it as a picture, the picture would be 
coming back to you at times the rest of your life 
darkly.” 

She protested : “ If it is dark to you, why should 
I not share the darkness of it? Have we not 
always looked at life’s shadows together? And 
thus seeing life, have not bright things been 
doubly bright to us and dark things but half as 
dark?” 

He merely repeated his warning : “ It is a story 
of a crueler age than ours. It goes back to the 
forest worship of the Druids.” 

She answered: “So long as our own age is 
cruel, what room is left to take seriously the mere 
stories of crueler ones ? Am I to shrink from the 
forest worship of the Druids ? Is there any story 
of theirs not printed in books ? Are not the books 
in libraries? Are they not put in libraries to be 


The Wandering Tale 119 

read ? If others read them, may not I ? And since 
when must I begin to dread anything in books? 
Or anything in life? And since when did we 
begin to look at life apart, we who have always 
looked at it with four eyes?” 

“I have always told you there are things to 
see with four eyes, things to see with two, and 
things to see with none.” 

With sudden intensity her white arm went up 
again and touched the mistletoe. 

“Tell me the story of this!” she pleaded as 
though she demanded a right. As she spoke, 
her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, 
they closed and went through it like a pair of 
shears; and a bunch of the white pearls of the 
forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and 
were broken apart and rolled across her breast 
into her lap. 

He looked grave; silence or speech — which 
were better for her? Either, he now saw, would 
give her pain. 

“Happily the story is far away from us,” he 
said, as though he were half inclined to grant her 
request. 


120 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

“ If it is far away, bring it near ! Bring it into 
the room as you brought the stories of the star 
and the candle and the cross and the dove and 
the others ! Make it live before my eyes ! Enact 
it before me ! Steep me in it as you have steeped 
yourself !” 

He held back a long time: “You who are so 
safe in good, why know evil?” 

“Frederick,” she cried, “I shall have to insist 
upon your telling me this story. And if you 
should keep any part of it back, I would know. 
Then tell it all : if it is dark, let each shadow have 
its shade; give each heavy part its heaviness; 
let cruelty be cruelty — and truth be truth!” 

He stood gazing across the centuries, and when 
he began, there was a change in him ; something 
personal was beginning to intrude itself into the 
narrative of the historian: 

“Imagine the world of our human nature in 
the last centuries before Palestine became Holy 
Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening 
by the blue ^Egean, and Greek girls with fillets 
and sandals — the living images of those pale 
sculptured shapes that are the mournful eternity 


The Wandering Tale 


121 


of Art — Greek girls were being chosen for the 
secret rites in the temple at Ephesus. The sun 
of Italy had not yet browned the little children who 
were to become the brown fathers and mothers of 
the brown soldiers of Caesar’s legions; and 
twenty miles south of Rome, in the sacred grove 
of Dodona, — where the motions of oak boughs 
were auguries, and the flappings of the wings of 
white doves were divine messages, and the tinkling 
of bells in the foliage had divine meanings, — in 
this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls 
of Ephesus, were once a year appointed to un- 
dergo similar rites. To the south Pompeii, with its 
night laughter and song sounding far out toward 
the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes 
of its dread volcano, drained its goblet and did 
not care, emptied it as often as filled and asked 
for nothing more. A little distance off Hercula- 
neum, with its tender dreams of Greece but with 
its arms around the breathing image of Italy, 
slept — uncovered. 

“ Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of 
the eternal snowcaps, lay unknown Gaul, not yet 
dreaming of the Caesar who was to conquer it; 


122 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the 
wooded isle of Britain. All over that island one 
forest; in that forest one worship; in that wor- 
ship one tree — the oak of England ; and on that 
oak one bough — the mistletoe.” 

He spoke to her awhile about the oak, de- 
scribing the place it had in the early civilizations 
of the human race. In the Old Testament it 
was the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. 
In Greece it was the tree of Zeus, the most august 
and the most human of the gods. In Italy it was 
the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of 
mankind. After the gods passed, it became 
the tree of the imperial Caesars. After the 
Caesars had passed, it was the oak that Michael 
Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the 
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel near the creation 
of man and his expulsion from Paradise — there 
as always the chosen tree of human desire. 
In Britain it was the sacred tree of Druidism ; there 
the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests performed 
none of their rites without using its leaves and 
branches: never anywhere in the world was the 
oak worshipped with such ceremonies and sacri- 
fices as there. 


The Wandering Tale 


123 


Imagine then a scene — the chief Nature 
Festival of that forest worship: the New Year’s 
day of the Druids. 

A vast concourse of people, men and women 
and children, are on their way to the forest; they 
are moving toward an oak tree that has been found 
with mistletoe growing on it — growing there so 
seldom. As the excited throng come in sight of 
it, they hail it with loud cries of reverence and 
delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet 
is spread. In the midst of the assemblage one 
figure towers — the Arch Druid. Every eye 
is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his 
own eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed 
to become one of the victims annually sacrificed 
to the oak. 

A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands 
are around his arms. He is clad in robes of spot- 
less white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, 
and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, 
he crops with a golden pruning hook the mistle- 
toe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed 
and scattered among the throng, and the priest 
prays that each one so receiving it may receive 


124 Bride of the Mistletoe 

also the divine favor and blessing of which it is 
Nature’s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of 
which have never hitherto been touched, are now 
adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in sacrifice. 

Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the 
forest is left to itself, and the New Year’s cere- 
mony of cutting the mistletoe from the oak is at 
an end. 

Here he ended the story. 

She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers 
interlocked and her brows knitted. When he 
stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment 
in bewilderment: 

“But why did you call that a dark story?” 
she asked. “ Where is the cruelty ? It is beauti- 
ful, and I shall never forget it and it will never 
throw a dark image on my mind: New Year’s 
day — the winter woods — the journeying throng 

— the oak — the bough — the banquet beneath 

— the white bulls with fillets on their horns — 
the white-robed priest — the golden sickle in 
his hand — the stroke that severs the mistletoe 

— the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest 
piece will be blessed in life’s sorrows ! If I were 


The Wandering Tale 


125 


a great painter, I should like to paint that scene. 
In the centre should be some young girl, pressing 
to her heart what she believed to be heaven^s 
covenant with her under the guise of a blossom. 
How could you have wished to withhold such a 
story from me?’^ 

He smiled at her a little sadly. 

have not yet told you all,” he said, “but I 
have told you enough.” 

Instantly she bent far over toward him with 
intuitive scrutiny. Under her breath one word 
escaped : 

“Ah!” 

It was the breath of a discovery — a discovery 
of something unknown to her. 

“I am sparing you, Josephine!” 

She stretched each arm along the back of the 
sofa and pinioned the wood in her clutch. 

“Are you sparing me?” she asked in a tone 
of torture. “Or are you sparing yourself?” 

The heavy staff on which he stood leaning 
dropped from his relaxed grasp to the floor. 
He looked down at it a moment and then calmly 
picked it up. 


126 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


am going to tell you the story/ ^ he said with 
a new quietness. 

She was warned by some change in him. 

“ I will not listen ! I do not wish to hear it ! ” 

‘‘You will have to listen,” he said. “It is 
better for you to know. Better for any human 
being to know any truth than suffer the bane of 
wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it 
will be impossible for you to misjudge.” 

“ I have not misjudged you I I have not judged 
you ! In some way that I do not understand you 
are judging yourself!” 

He stepped back a pace — farther away from 
her — and he drew himself up. In the movement 
there was instinctive resentment. And the right 
not to be pried into — not even by the nearest. 

The step which had removed him farther from 
her had brought him nearer to the Christmas 
Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough 
being thus pressed against was forced upward 
and reappeared on one of his shoulders. The 
movement seemed human: it was like the con- 
scious hand of the tree. The fir, standing there 
decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a double- 


The Wandering Tale 


127 


dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him — 
as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers — 
and let its passing youth flow into him. It 
attracted his attention, and he turned his head 
toward it as with recognition. Other boughs 
near the floor likewise thrust themselves forward, 
hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in 
forestry. 

This reunion did not escape her. Her over- 
wrought imagination made of it a sinister omen : 
the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old 
forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the 
ancestral forest tether. As he had stepped back- 
ward from her. Nature had asserted the earlier 
right to him. In strange sickness and desolation 
of heart she waited. 

He stood facing her but looking past her at 
centuries long gone; the first sound of his voice 
registered upon her ear some message of doom: 

^‘Listen, Josephine!” 

She buried her face in her hands. 

‘‘I cannot! I will not!” 

^‘You will have to listen. You know that for 
some years, apart from my other work, I have been 


128 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

gathering together the woodland customs of our 
people and trying to trace them back to their 
origin and first meaning. In our age of the 
world we come upon many playful forest survi- 
vals of what w^ere once grave things. Often in 
our play and pastimes and lingering superstitions 
about the forest we cross faint traces of what were 
once vital realities. 

Among these there has always been one that 
until recently I have never understood. Among 
country people oftenest, but heard of everywhere, 
is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under 
the mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who 
thus finds her. I have always thought that this 
ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to some 
ancient rite — I could not discover what. Now 
I know.” 

In a voice that brought an old pitiless law into 
the room, he told her. 

It is another scene in the forest of Britain. 
This time it is not the first day of the year — 
the New Year’s day of the Druids when they 
celebrate the national festival of the oak. But 


The Wandering Tale 


129 


it is early summer, perhaps the middle of May — 
May in England — with the young beauty of 
the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. 
The new moon is just silvering the tender leaves 
and creating a faint shadow under the trees. 
The hawthorn is in bloom — red and white — 
and not far from the spot, hidden in some fra- 
grant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing, singing, 
singing. 

Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands 
the young manhood of the woods — a splendid oak 
past its thirtieth year, representing its youth and 
its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer 
heat of the all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet 
turf, and there are wild violet beds. Its huge arms 
are stretched toward the ground as though reach- 
ing for some object they would clasp ; and on one 
of these arms as its badge of divine authority, 
worn there as a knight might wear the colors of his 
Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands 
— the Forest Lover. 

The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush 
is more intense, the moon’s rays begin to be 


130 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

golden, the song of the nightingale grows more 
passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait. 

Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at 
some place and upon the scene a young girl enters 
— her hair hanging down — her limbs most lightly 
clad — the flush of red hawthorn on the white 
hawthorn of her skin — in her eyes love’s great 
need and mystery. Step by step she comes 
forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever 
budding wayside thing may stay her strength. 
She draws nearer to the oak, searching amid its 
boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to 
find and yet more dreads not to find : the emblem 
of a woman’s fruitfulness which the young oak — 
the Forest Lover — reaches down toward her. 
Finding it, beneath it with one deep breath of 
surrender she takes her place — the virgin’s tryst 
with the tree — there to be sacrificed. 

Such is the command of the Arch Druid : it is 
obedience — submission to that rite — or death 
for her as an offering to the oak which she has 
rejected. 

Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed 
aside, and a man enters — a tried and seasoned 


The Wandering Tale 


131 

man — a human oak — counterpart of the Forest 
Lover — to officiate at her sacrifice. 

He was standing there in the parlor of his 
house and in the presence of his wife. But in 
fealty he was gone : he was in the summer woods 
of ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old 
Desire. 

He was the man treading down the shrubbery; 
it was his feet that started toward the oak; his 
eye that searched for the figure half fainting under 
the bough; for him the bed of moss and violets — 
the hair falling over the eyes — the loosened girdle 
— the breasts of hawthorn white and pink — 
the listening song of the nightingale — the silence 
of the summer woods — the seclusion — the full 
surrender of the two under that bough of the 
divine command, to escape the penalty of their 
own death. 

The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over 
him; the fire of his own story had treacherously 
licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light 
that she had not seen in his eyes for so long 
rose in them — the old, unfathomable, infolding 


132 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

tenderness. A flush ran across his tense 
face. 

And now one little phrase which he had uttered 
so sacredly years before and had long since for- 
gotten rose a second time to his lips — tossed there 
by a second tide of feeling. On the agony of her 
ear fell his words : 

Bride of the Mistletoe 1 ” 

The storm that had broken over him died away. 
He shut his eyes on the vanishing scene : he opened 
them upon her. 

He had told her the truth about the story; he 
may have been aware or he may not have been 
aware that he had revealed to her the truth about 
himself. 

“ This is what I would have kept from you, Jose- 
phine,’^ he said quietly. 

She was sitting there before him — the mother 
of his children, of the sleeping ones, of the buried 
ones — the butterfly broken on the wheel of 
years : lustreless and useless now in its summer. 

She sat there with the whiteness of death. 


THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES 


i 


V 


V 


THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES 

^HE Christmas candles looked at her 
ra flickeringly ; the little white can- 
K dies of purity, the little, red candles 
^ of love. The holly in the room 
concealed its bold gay berries be- 
hind its thorns, and the cedar from the faithful 
tree beside the house wall had need now of its 
bitter rosary. 

Her first act was to pay what is the first debt 
of a fine spirit — the debt of courtesy and gratitude. 

“It is a wonderful story, Frederick,” she said 
in a manner which showed him that she referred 
to the beginning of his story and not to the end. 
“As usual you have gone your own way about it, 
opening your own path into the unknown, seeing 
what no one else has seen, and bringing back what 
no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation 
of things that I never dreamed of and could never 
have imagined. I appreciate your having done 
135 



136 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is 
too much for me to-night. It is too new and too 
vast. I must hereafter try to understand it. And 
there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by 
waiting. But now there is something that can- 
not wait, and I wish to speak to you about that; 
Frederick, I am going to ask you some questions 
about the last part of the story. I have been 
wanting to ask you a long time: the story gives 
me the chance and — the right.” 

He advanced a step toward her, disengaging 
himself from the evergreen. 

“ I will answer them,” he said. “ If they can be 
answered.” 

And thus she sat and thus he stood as the 
questions and answers passed to and fro. They 
were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn 
out of the deeps of life and sinking back into 
them. 

‘‘Frederick,” she said, “for many years we 
have been happy together, so happy! Every 
tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us 
except the loss of our children. We have lived 
on a sunny pinnacle of our years, lifted above 


The Room of the Silences 137 

life’s storms. But of course I have realized that 
sooner or later our lot must become the common 
one : if we did not go down to Sorrow, Sorrow 
would climb to us ; and I knew that on the heights 
it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you 
to-night what I shall: I think fate’s hour has 
struck for me; I am ready to hear it. Its arrow 
has already left the bow and is on its way; I 
open my heart to receive it. This is as I have 
always wished; I have said that if life had any 
greatest tragedy for me, I hoped it would come 
when I was happiest; thus I should confront it 
all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happi- 
ness, as you know, and let the other half waste; 
I must go equally to the depth of any suffering. 
Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the 
feeling that I had shirked some of it, had stepped 
aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown 
myself a cowardly soul.” 

After a pause she went over this subject as 
though she were not satisfied that she had made 
it clear. 

“I have always said that the real pathos of 
things is the grief that comes to us in life when 


138 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

life is at its best — when no one is to blame — 
when no one has committed a fault — when suffer- 
ing is meted out to us as the reward of our perfect 
obedience to the laws of nature. In earlier years 
when we used to read Keats together, who most 
of all of the world’s poets felt the things that pass, 
even then I was wondering at the way in which 
he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow 
it must be separated from sorrows : they would 
be like shadows darkening the bright disk of 
life’s clear tragedy, thus rendering it less bravely 
seen. 

And so he is always telling us not to summon 
sad pictures nor play with mournful emblems; 
not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks 
of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers ; nor to gather wolf’s 
bane and twist the poison out of its tight roots ; 
nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind 
about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; 
nor count over the berries of the yew tree which 
guards sad places ; nor think of the beetle ticking 
in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death 
moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl — the 
voice of ruins. Not these ! they are the emblems 


The Room of the Silences 139 

of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are 
beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red 
peony just opening, a rainbow seen for an instant 
on the white foam, youth not yet faded but already 
fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding 
adieu. 

“And so with all my happiness about me, I 
wish to know life’s tragedy. And to know it, 
Frederick, not to infer it : I want to he toldT 

“If you can be told, you shall be told,” he said. 

She changed her position as though seeking 
physical relief and composure. Then she began: 

“Years ago when you were a student in Ger- 
many, you had a college friend. You went home 
with him two or three years at Christmas and 
celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this 
way that we came to have the Christmas Tree in 
our house — through memory of him and of those 
years. You have often described to me how you 
and he in summer went Alpine climbing, and far 
up in some green valley girdled with glaciers lay of 
afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drows- 
ing in the crystalline air. You told me of your 
nights of wandering down the Rhine together when 


140 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

the heart turns so intimately to the heart beside 
it. He was German youth and song and dream 
and happiness to you. Tell me this : before you 
lost him that last summer over the crevasse, had 
you begun to tire of him? Was there anything 
in you that began to draw back from anything in 
him? As you now look back at the friendship 
of your youth, have the years lessened your 
regret for him?^^ 

He answered out of the ideals of his youth : 

‘‘The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. 
I never tired of being with him. Nothing in me 
ever drew back from anything in him. When he 
was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength 
and nobility. After all the years, if he could 
come back, he would find me unchanged — that 
friend of my youth !” 

With a peculiar change of voice she asked 
next: 

“The doctor, Herbert and Elsie’s father, our 
nearest neighbor, your closest friend now in 
middle life. Y ou see a great deal of the doctor ; he 
is often here, and you and he often sit up late at 
night, talking with one another about many things: 


The Room of the Silences 14 1 

do you ever tire of the doctor and wish him away ? 
Have you any feeling toward him that you try to 
keep secret from me? Can you be a perfectly 
frank man with this friend of your middle life?’’ 

‘‘The longer I know him the more I like him, 
honor him, trust him. I never tire of his com- 
panionship or his conversation; I have no dis- 
guises with him and need none.” 

“The children ! As the children grow older do 
you care less for them ? Do they begin to wear 
on you ? Are they a clog, an interference ? 
Have Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new 
growths of affection in you? Do you ever un- 
consciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?” 

“The older they grow, the more I love them. 
The more they interest me and tempt away from 
work and duties. I am more drawn to be with 
them and I live more and more in the thought of 
what they are becoming.” 

“Your work ! Does your work attract you less 
than formerly? Does it develop in you the pur- 
pose to be something more or stifle in you the 
regret to be something less? Is it a snare to 
idleness or a goad to toil?” 


142 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


“As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the 
hound runs down the stag, as the soldier wakes to 
the bugle, as the miner digs for fortune, as the 
drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the 
cross, I follow my work, I follow my work.’^ 

“Life, life itself, does it increase in value or 
lessen? Is the world still morning to you with 
your work ahead or afternoon when you begin to 
tire and to think of rest?” 

“ The world to me is as early morning to a man 
going forth to his work. Where the human race is 
from and whither it is hurrying and why it exists 
at all; why a human being loves what it loves 
and hates what it hates; why it is faithful when 
it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should 
be true; how civilized man can fight single 
handed against the ages that were his lower past 
— how he can develop self-renunciation out of 
selfishness and his own wisdom out of surround- 
ing folly, — all these are questions that mean 
more and more. My work is but beginning and 
the world is morning.” 

“This house ! Are you tired of it now that it is 
older ? Would you rather move into a new one ? ” 


The Room of the Silences 143 

“I love this house more and more. No other 
dwelling could take its place. Any other could be 
but a shelter; this is home. And I care more 
for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on 
it. If it were a ruin, I should love it best 

She leaned over and looked down at the two 
setters lying at her feet. 

“ Do you care less for the dogs of the house as 
they grow older?” 

“I think more of them and take better care of 
them now that their hunting days are over.” 

“The friend of your youth — the friend of 
your middle age — the children — your profes- 
sion — the world of human life — this house — 
the dogs of the house — you care more for them 
all as time passes?” 

“I care more for them all as time passes.” 

Then there came a great stillness in the room 
— the stillness of all listening years. 

“Am I the only thing that you care less for as 
time passes?” 

There was no reply. 

“Am I in the way?” 

There was no reply. 


144 Bride of the Mistletoe 

Would you like to go over it all again with 
another?^’ 

There was no reply. 

She had hidden her face in her hands and 
pressed her head against the end of the sofa. Her 
whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape 
being touched by him — to escape the blow of his 
words. No words came. There was no touch. 

A moment later she felt that he must be stand- 
ing over her, looking down at her. She would 
respond to his hand on the back of her neck. 
He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would 
infold her. Then with a kind of incredible terror 
she realized that he was not there. At first she 
could so little believe it, that with her face still 
buried in one hand she searched the air for him 
with the other, expecting to touch him. 

Then she cried out to him: 

‘‘Isn’t there anything you can say to me?” 

Silence lasted. 

“O^, Fred! 

In the stillness she began to hear something — 
the sound of his footsteps moving on the carpet. 
She sat up. 


The Room of the Silences 145 

The room was getting darker; he was putting 
out the candles. It was too dark already to see 
his face. With fascination she began to watch 
his hand. How steady it was as it moved among 
the boughs, extinguishing the lights. Out they 
went one by one and back into their darkness 
returned the emblems of darker ages — the Forest 
Memories. 

A solitary taper was left burning at the pin- 
nacle of the Tree under the cross: that highest 
torch of love shining on everything that had 
disappeared. 

He quietly put it out. 

Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly 
to have travelled through the open parlor door 
into the adjoining room, her bedroom; for out 
of that there now streamed a suffused red light; 
it came from the lamp near the great bed in the 
shadowy comer. 

This lamp poured its light through a lamp- 
shade having the semblance of a bursting crimson 
peony as some morning in June the flower with 
the weight of its own splendor falls face downward 
on the grass. And in that room this soft lamp- 


146 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

light fell here and there on crimson winter dra- 
peries. He had been living alone as a bachelor 
before he married her. After they became en- 
gaged he, having watched for some favorite color 
of hers, had had this room redecorated in that 
shade. Every winter since she had renewed in 
this way or that way these hangings, and now 
the bridal draperies remained faithful — after 
the changing years. 

He replaced the taper against the wall and 
came over and stood before her, holding out his 
hands to help her rise. 

She arose without his aid and passed around 
him, moving toward her bedroom. With arms 
outstretched guarding her but not touching her, 
he followed close, for she was unsteady. She 
entered her bedroom and crossed to the door of 
his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping 
her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He 
went in and she closed the door on him and turned 
the key. Then with a low note, with which the 
soul tears out of itself something that has been its 
life, she made a circlet of her white arms against 
the door and laid her profile within this circlet 
and stood — the figure of Memory. 


The Room of the Silences 147 

Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure 
standing outside a tomb where some story of 
love and youth ended: some stranger in a far 
land, — walking some afternoon in those quieter 
grounds where all human stories end ; an autumn 
bird in the bare branches fluting of its mortality 
and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to 
him — lost to him in his own country. 

On the other side of the door the silence was 
that of a tomb. She had felt confident — so 
far as she had expected anything — that he would 
speak to her through the door, try to open it, 
plead with her to open it. Nothing of the kind 
occurred. 

Why did he not come back ? What bolt could 
have separated her from him ? 

The silence began to weigh upon her. 

Then in the tense stillness she heard him 
moving quietly about, getting ready for bed. 
There were the same movements, familiar to her 
for years. She would not open the door, she 
could not leave it, she could not stand, no support 
was near, and she sank to the floor and sat there, 
leaning her brow against the lintel. 


148 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

On the other side the quiet preparations went on. 

She heard him take off his coat and vest and 
hang them on the back of a chair. The buttons 
made a little scraping sound against the wood. 
Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar 
and tie, and he opened a drawer and laid out a 
night-shirt. She heard the creaking of a chair 
under him as he threw one foot and then the 
other up across his knee and took off his shoes 
and socks. Then there reached her the soft 
movements of his bare feet on the carpet (de- 
spite her agony the old impulse started in her 
to caution him about his slippers). Then fol- 
lowed the brushing of his teeth and the de- 
liberate bathing of his hands. Then was audible 
the puff of breath with which he blew out his 
lamp after he had turned it low ; and then, — on 
the other side of the door, — just above her ear 
his knock sounded. 

The same knock waited for and responded to 
throughout the years; so often with his little 
variations of playfulness. Many a time in early 
summer when out-of-doors she would be re- 
minded of it by hearing some bird sounding its 


The Room of the Silences 149 

love signal on a piece of dry wood — that tap of 
heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear. 

Such strength came back to her that she rose 
as lightly as though her flesh were but will and 
spirit. When he knocked again, she was across 
the room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her 
palms pressed together and thrust between her 
knees: the instinctive act of a human animal 
suddenly chilled to the bone. 

The knocking sounded again. 

“Was there anything you needed?” she asked 
fearfully. 

There was no response but another knock. 

She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure 
that it would reach him. 

“Was there anything you wanted ? ” 

As no response came, the protective maternal 
instinct took greater alarm, and she crossed to 
the door of his room and she repeated her one 
question : 

“Did you forget anything?” 

Her mind refused to release itself from the 
iteration of that idea: it was some thing — not 
herself — that he wanted. 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


150 

He knocked. 

Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, 
now made of his knock some signal of distress. 
It took on the authority of an appeal not to be 
denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a 
little way, and once more she asked her one poor 
question. 

His answer to it came in the form of a gentle 
pressure against the door, breaking down her 
resistance. As she applied more strength, this 
was as gently overcome; and when the open- 
ing was sufficient, he walked past her into the 
room. 

How hushed the house! How still the world 
outside as the cloud wove in darkness its mantle 
of light 1 


THE WHITE DAWN 



« 


I 








i 


I 




VI 


THE WHITE DAWN 



AY was breaking. 

The crimson curtains of the bed- 
room were drawn close, but from 
behind their outer edges faint 
flanges of light began to advance 
along the wall. It was a clear light reflected 
from snow which had sifted in against the window- 
panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the 
yard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried 
the shrubbery. There was no need to look out 
in order to know that it had stopped snowing, 
that the air was windless, and that the stars were 
flashing silver-pale except one — great golden- 
croziered shepherd of the thick, soft-footed, 
moving host. 

It was Christmas morning on the effulgent 
Shield. 

Already there was sufficient light in the room 
to reveal — less as actual things than as brown 
shadows of the memory — a gay company of 
153 


154 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


socks and stockings hanging from the mantel- 
piece; sufficient to give outline to the bulk of a 
man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it exposed 
to view in a corner of the room farthest from the 
rays a woman sitting in a straight-backed chair, 
a shawl thrown about her shoulders over her 
night-dress. 

He always slept till he was awakened; the 
children, having stayed up past their usual bed- 
time, would sleep late also; she had the white 
dawn to herself in quietness. 

She needed it. 

Sleep could not have come to her had she 
wished. She had not slept and she had not lain 
down, and the sole endeavor during those shat- 
tered hours had been to prepare herself for his 
awakening. She was not yet ready — she felt 
that during the rest of her life she should never 
be quite ready to meet him again. Scant time 
remained now. 

Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment 
and outdoor noises would begin. Wherever in 
the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud 
of its size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or 


The White Dawn 


155 


any little inland town was proud of its smallness 
and of streets that terminated in the fields ; where- 
ever any hamlet marked the point at which two 
country roads this morning made the sign of the 
white cross, or homesteads stood proudly castled 
on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the 
beholder from amid their olive-dark winter pas- 
tures; or far away on the shaggy uplift of the 
Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow’s 
nest against the gray Appalachian wall — every- 
where soon would begin the healthy outbreak of 
joy among men and women and children — glad 
about themselves, glad in one another, glad of 
human life in a happy world. The many-voiced 
roar and din of this warm carnival lay not far 
away from her across the cold bar of silence. 

Soon within the house likewise the rush of the 
children’s feet would startle her ear; they would 
be tugging at the door, tugging at her heart. 
And as she thought of this, the recollection of old 
simple things came pealing back to her from 
behind life’s hills. The years parted like naked 
frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in her 
womanhood, fled backward till she herself was a 


156 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


child again — safe in her father’s and mother’s 
protection. It was Christmas morning, and she in 
bare feet was tipping over the cold floors toward 
their bedroom — toward her stockings. 

Her father and mother ! How she needed them 
at this moment: they had been sweethearts all 
their lives. One picture of them rose with dis- 
tinctness before her — for the wounding picture 
always comes to the wounded moment. She saw 
them sitting in their pew far down toward the 
chancel. Through a stained glass window (where 
there was a ladder of angels) the light fell softly 
on them — both silver-haired; and as with the 
voices of children they were singing out of one 
book. She remembered how as she sat between 
them she had observed her father slip his hand 
into her mother’s lap and clasp hers with a stead- 
fastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus 
over their linked hands, with the love of their 
youth within them and the snows of the years 
upon them, they sang together: 

“ Gently, Lord, O gently lead us 

4! * Hi * ♦ * 

“ Through the changes Thou’st decreed us.” 


The White Dawn 


157 


Her father and mother had not been led gently. 
They had known more than common share of life’s 
shocks and violence, its wrongs and meannesses 
and ills and griefs. But their faith had never 
wavered that they were being led gently ; so long as 
they were led together, to them it was gentle lead- 
ing: the richer each in each for aught whereby 
nature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer 
for the shocks; the sweeter for the sour; the 
finer with one another because of life’s rudenesses. 
In after years she often thought of them as faithful 
in their dust; and the flowers she planted over 
them and watered many a bright day with happy 
tears brought up to her in another form the fresh- 
ness of their unwearied union. 

That was what she had not doubted her own 
life would be — with him — when she had married 
him. 

From the moment of the night before when he 
had forced the door open and entered her room, 
they had not exchanged any words nor a glance. 
He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; ap- 
parently he had offered that to her as for the 


158 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


moment at least his solution of the matter — that 
he should leave her to herself and absent himself 
in slumber. 

The instant she knew him to be asleep she set 
about her preparations. 

Before he awoke she must be gone — out of the 
house — anywhere — to save herself from living 
any longer with him. His indifference in the pres- 
ence of her suffering ; his pitiless withdrawal from 
her of touch and glance and speech as she had 
gone down into that darkest of life’s valleys; his 
will of iron that since she had insisted upon know- 
ing the whole truth, know it she should : all this 
left her wounded and stunned as by an incredible 
blow, and she was acting first from the instinct 
of removing herself beyond the reach of further 
humiliation and brutality. 

Instinctively she took off her wedding ring 
and laid it on his dresser beside his watch: he 
would find it there in the morning and he could 
dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the 
plainest heavy one and put on heavy walking 
shoes. She packed into a handbag a few necessary 
things with some heirlooms of her own. Among 


The White Dawn 


159 


the latter was a case of family jewels ; and as she 
opened it, her eyes fell upon her mother’s thin 
wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped 
that on and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also 
her mother’s locket containing a miniature da- 
guerreotype of her father and dutifully fed her 
eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired 
then, but raven-locked; with eyes that men feared 
at times but no woman ever. 

His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood 
when he had curbed her exuberance and guided 
her waywardness. He was watching as she, 
coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of 
things of her own, opened her front door, left her 
footprints in the snow on the porch, and passed 
out — wading away. Those eyes of his saw what 
took place the next day : the happiness of Christ- 
mas morning turned into horror; the children 
wild with distress and crying — the servants 
dumb — the inquiry at neighbors’ houses — the 
news spreading to the town — the papers — the 
black ruin. And from him two restraining words 
issued for her ear : 

“My daughter 1” 


i6o The Bride of the Mistletoe 

Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and 
her pride answered him. And so answering, it 
applied a torch to her blood and her blood took 
fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept 
her. She stopped her preparations; she had 
begun to think as well as to feel. 

She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each 
article back into its place with exaggerated pains. 
Having done this, she stood in the middle of the 
floor, looking about her irresolute : then respond- 
ing to that power of low suggestion which is one 
of anger’s weapons, she began to devise malice. 
She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took 
from a bottom drawer — where long ago it had 
been stored away under everything else — a shawl 
that had been her grandmother’s; a brindled 
crewel shawl, — sometimes worn by superannu- 
ated women of a former generation ; a garment 
of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she had 
loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it 
added to her ugliness and decrepitude. 

She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw 
it decoratively around her shoulders. She strode 
to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting it off. 


The White Dawn 


i6i 


gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the 
floor. She turned the lamp up as high as it would 
safely burn so that the huge lidless eye of it 
would throw its full glare on him and her. She 
drew a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and 
seating herself put her forefinger up to each temple 
and drew out from their hiding places under the 
mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let 
these hang down haglike across her bosom. She 
banished the carefully nourished look of youth 
from her face — dropped the will to look young — 
and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it — 
into the wastage, the wreckage, which he and 
Nature, assisting each other so ably, had wrought 
in her. 

She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; 
waiting for the glare of the lamp to cause him to 
open his eyes ; and she smiled upon him in exulta- 
tion of vengeance that she was to live on there in 
his house — his house. Not her home. 

After a while a darker mood came over her. 

With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she 
began to move about the room. She put out the 
lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it 


M 


i 62 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


would be screened from his face; and where the 
shadow of the chamber was heaviest, into that 
shadow she retired and in it she sat — with furtive 
look to see whether he observed her. 

A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed 
where he lay. 

Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream 
across the generations was Anglo-Saxon blood of 
the world^s fiercest ; floating in the tide of it pas- 
sions of old family life which had dyed history for all 
time in tragedies of false friendship, false love, and 
false battle; but fiercest ever about the marriage 
bed and the betrayal of its vow. A thousand years 
from this night some wronged mother of hers, 
sitting beside some sleeping father of hers in their 
forest-beleaguered castle — the moonlight stream- 
ing in upon him through the javelined casement 
and putting before her the manly beauty of him — 
the blond hair matted thick on his forehead as his 
helmet had left it, his mouth reddening in his 
slumber under its curling gold — some mother of 
hers whom he had carried off from other men by 
might of his sword, thus sitting beside him and 
knowing him to be colder to her now than the 


The White Dawn 163 

moon’s dead rays, might have watched those rays 
as they travelled away from his figure and put a 
gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand 
years ago : some mother of hers. 

It is when the best fails our human nature that 
the worst volunteers so often to take its place. 
The best and the worst — these are the sole 
alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable 
of making: hence life’s spectacle of swift over- 
throw, of amazing collapse, ever present about us. 
Only the heroic among both men and women, 
losing the best as their first choice, fight their way 
through defeat to the standard of the second best 
and fight on there. And whatever one may think 
of the legend otherwise, abundant experience 
justifies the story that it was the Archangel who 
fell to the pit. The low never fall far: how can 
they ? They already dwell on the bottom of things, 
and many a time they are to be seen there with 
vanity that they should inhabit such a privileged 
highland. 

During the first of these hours which stretched 
for her into the tragic duration of a lifetime, it was 
a successive falling from a height of moral 


164 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

splendor; her nature went down through swift 
stages to the lowest she harbored either in the 
long channel of inheritance or as the stirred sedi- 
ment of her own imperfections. And as is un- 
fortunately true, this descent into moral darkness 
possessed the grateful illusion that it was an ascent 
into new light. All evil prompting became good 
suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be 
justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling 
that she was dragging herself out of life’s quick- 
sands upward to some rock where there might be 
loneliness for her, but where there would be clean- 
ness. The love which consumed her for him raged 
in her as hatred; and hatred is born into perfect 
mastery of its weapons. However young, it 
needs not to wait for training in order to know 
how to destroy. 

He presented himself to her as a character at 
last revealed in its faithlessness and low carnal pro- 
pensities. What rankled most poignantly in this 
spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that 
the cloven hoof should have been found on noble 
mountain tops — that he should have attempted 
to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of 


The White Dawn 


165 


sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detest- 
able to her was that which dares live within spirit- 
ual fortresses; and now his whole story of the 
Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words 
about the growth of the world’s spirit — about the 
sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the higher — 
this cant now became to her the invocation and 
homage of the practised impostor : he had indeed 
carried the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into 
the manger. Not the Manger of Immortal Purity 
for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality. 

Thus scorn and satire became her speech ; she 
soared above him with spurning; a frenzy of 
poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when 
he had let her know that he wanted to be free — 
at that moment she might tell him he had won his 
freedom at the cheap price of his unworthiness. 

And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the 
triumph of rising; so the devil in us never lacks 
argument that he is the celestial guide. 

Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it 
readily finds boon companions. And at one 
period of the night she began to look back upon 
her experience with a curious sense of prior fa- 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


1 66 

miliarity — to see it as a story already known to 
her at second hand. She viewed it as the first stage 
of one of those tragedies that later find their way 
into the care of family physicians, into the briefs 
of lawyers, into the confidence of clergymen, 
into the papers and divorce courts, and that re- 
ceive their final flaying or canonization on the 
stage and in novels of the time. Sitting at a 
distance, she had within recent years studied 
in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation’s 
press, the nation’s science of medicine, the nation’s 
science of law, the nation’s practice of religion, and 
the nation’s imaginative literature were all at 
work with the same national omen — the decay of 
the American family and the downfall of the home. 

Now this new pestilence raging in other regions 
of the country had incredibly reached her, she 
thought, on the sheltered lowlands where the 
older traditions of American home life still lay like 
^foundation rock. The corruption of it had at- 
tacked him; the ruin of it awaited her; and thus 
to-night she took her place among those women 
whom the world first hears of as in hospitals and 
sanitariums and places of refuge and in their 


The White Dawn 


167 


graves — and more sadly elsewhere; whose mis- 
fortunes interested the press and whose types at- 
tracted the novelists. 

She was one of them. 

They swarmed about her; one by one she 
recognized them : the woman who unable to bear 
up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity — 
or walks into it ; the woman who disappears from 
the scene and somewhere under another name or 
with another lot lives on — devoting herself to 
memory or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays 
on in the house, giving to the world no sign for the 
sake of everything else that still remains to her but 
living apart — on the other side of the locked door; 
the woman who stays on without locking the door, 
half-hating, half-loving — the accepted and re- 
jected compromise; the woman who welcomes 
the end of the love-drama as the beginning of 
peace and the cessation of annoyances ; the 
woman who begins to act her tragedy to ser- 
vants and children and acquaintances — reaping 
sympathy for herself and sowing ruin and torture 
— for him; the woman who drops the care of 
house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp 


i68 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


reminder of her value as at least an investment 
toward his general well-being; the woman 
who endeavors to rekindle dying coals by 
fanning them with fresh fascinations ; the woman 
who plays upon jealousy and touches the male 
instinct to keep one’s own though little prized 
lest another acquire it and prize it more; the 
woman who sets a watch to discover the other 
woman : they swarmed about her, she identified 
each. 

And she dismissed them. They brought her no 
aid; she shrank from their companionship; a 
strange dread moved her lest they should discover 
her. One only she detached from the throng and 
for a while withdrew with her into a kind of dual 
solitude : the woman who when so rejected turns 
to another man — the man who is waiting some- 
where near. 

The man she turned to, who for years had 
hovered near, was the country doctor, her hus- 
band’s tried and closest friend, whose children 
were asleep upstairs with her children. During 
all these years her secret had been — the doctor. 
When she had come as a bride into that neighbor- 


The White Dawn 


169 


hood, he, her husband^s senior by several years, 
was already well established in his practice. He 
had attended her at the birth of her first child; 
never afterwards. As time passed, she had dis- 
covered that he loved her; she could never have 
him again. This had dealt his professional repu- 
tation a wound, but he understood, and he wel- 
comed the wound. 

Many a night, lying awake near her window, 
through which noises from the turnpike plainly 
reached her, all earthly happiness asleep along- 
side her, she could hear the doctor’s buggy pass- 
ing on its way to some patient, or on its return 
from the town where he had patients also. Many 
a time she had heard it stop at the front gate : 
the road of his life there turned in to her. There 
were nights of pitch darkness and beating rain; 
and sometimes on these she had to know that 
he was out there. 

Long she sat in the shadow of her room, 
looking towards the bed where her husband 
slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the 
doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; 
she would be dancing with him. 


170 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain 
of life and enveloped it. She groped her way, 
torn and wounded, downward along the old lost 
human paths. 

The endless night scarcely moved on. 

She was wearied out, she was exhausted. 
There is anger of such intensity that it scorches 
and shrivels away the very temptations that are 
its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of 
that white flame, and being unfed, it dies out. 
Moreover, it is the destiny of a portion of man- 
kind that they are enjoined by their very nobility 
from winning low battles ; these always go 
against them: the only victories for them are 
won when they are leading the higher forces of 
human nature in life’s upward conflicts. 

She was weary, she was exhausted; there was 
in her for a while neither moral light nor moral 
darkness. Her consciousness lay like a bound- 
less plain on which nothing is visible. She had 
passed into a great calm; and slowly there was 
borne across her spirit a clearness that is like 
the radiance of the storm-winged sky. 


The White Dawn 


171 

And now in this calm, in this clearness, two 
small white figures appeared — her children. 
Hitherto the energies of her mind had grappled 
with the problem of her future; now memories 
began — memories that decide more perhaps 
than anything else for us. And memories began 
with her children. 

She arose without making any noise, took her 
candle, and screening it with the palm of her 
hand, started upstairs. 

There were two ways by either of which she 
could go; a narrow rear stairway leading from 
the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the 
broad stairway in the front hall. From the old 
maternal night-habit she started to take the 
shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew 
back. This room had become too truly the 
Judgment Seat of the Years. She shrank from 
it as one who has been arraigned may shrink 
from a tribunal where sentence has been pro- 
nounced which changes the rest of life. Its 
flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but deepened 
the derision and the bitterness. And the ever- 
green there in the middle of the room — it be- 


1/2 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


came to her as that tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil which at Creation’s morning had driven 
Woman from Paradise. 

She chose the other way and started toward 
the main hall of the house, but paused in the 
doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he 
should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowl- 
edge of where she was? Would he call out to 
her — with what voice? Would he come to seek 
her — with what emotions? (The tide of memo- 
ries was setting in now — the drift back to the 
old mooring.) 

Hunt for her ! How those words fell like iron 
strokes on the ear of remembrance. They regis- 
tered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to 
the last two years his first act upon reaching 
home had been to seek her. It had even been 
her playfulness at times to slip from room to 
room for the delight of proving how persistently 
he would prolong his search. But one day some 
two years before this, when she had entered his 
study about the usual hour of his return, bring- 
ing flowers for his writing desk, she saw him 
sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on, making 


The White Dawn 


173 


some notes. The sight had struck the flowers 
from her hands; she swiftly gathered them up, 
and going to her room, shut herself in ; she knew 
it was the beginning of the end. 

The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp 
had become the Spectre of the bedchamber. 

When they met later that day, he was not 
even aware of what he had done or failed to do, 
the change in him was so natural to himself. 
Everything else had followed : the old look dying 
out of the eyes; the old touch abandoning the 
hands; less time for her in the house, more for 
work; constraint beginning between them, the 
awkwardness of reserve; she seeing Nature’s 
movement yet refusing to believe it; then at last 
resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing 
her bridal night as the hour of the ordeal. 

If he awoke, would he come to seek her — 
with what feelings? 

She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one 
side with her right hand and supporting herself 
by the banisters with her left. There was a turn 
in the stairway at the second floor, and here the 
candle rays fell on the face of the tall clock in 


174 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


the hallway. She sat down on a step, putting 
the candle beside her; and there she remained, 
her elbows on her knees, her face resting on her 
palms; and into the abyss of the night dropped 
the tranquil strokes. More memories ! 

She was by nature not only alive to all life 
but alive to surrounding lifeless things. Much 
alone in the house, she had sent her happiness 
overflowing its dumb environs — humanizing 
these — drawing them toward her by a gracious 
responsive symbolism — extending speech over 
realms which nature has not yet awakened to it 
or which she may have struck into speechlessness 
long aeons past. 

She had symbolized the clock; it was the 
wooden God of Hours; she had often feigned 
that it might be propitiated; and opening the 
door of it she would pin inside the walls little 
clusters of blossoms as votive offerings: if it 
would only move faster and bring him home! 
The usual hour of his return from college was 
three in the afternoon. She had symbolized that 
hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for 
the children — the three in one — the trinity of 
the household. 


The White Dawn 175 

She sat there on the step with the candle burn- 
ing beside her. 

The clock struck three ! The sound went 
through the house : down to him, up to the chil- 
dren, into her. It was like a cry of a night 
watch: all is well! 

It was the first sound that had reached her 
from any source during this agony, and now it 
did not come from humanity, but from outside 
humanity; from Time itself which brings us to- 
gether and holds us together as long as possible 
and then separates us and goes on its way — 
indifferent whether we are together or apart; 
Time which welds the sands into the rock and 
then wears the rock away to its separate sands 
and sends the level tide softly over them. 

Once for him, once for her, once for the chil- 
dren I She took up the candle and went upstairs 
to them. 

For a while she stood beside the bed in one 
room where the two little girls were asleep clasp- 
ing each other, cheek against cheek; and in an- 
other room at the bedside of the two little boys, 
their backs turned on one another and each with 


1^6 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

a hand doubled into a promising fist outside the 
cover. In a few years how differently the four 
would be divided and paired; each boy a young 
husband, each girl a young wife; and out of the 
lives of the two of them who were hers she would 
then drop into some second place. If to-night 
she were realizing what befalls a wife when she 
becomes the Incident to her husband, she would 
then realize what befalls a woman when the 
mother becomes the Incident to her children: 
Woman, twice the Incident in Nature’s impartial 
economy ! Her son would playfully confide it to 
his bride that she must bear with his mother’s 
whims and ways. Her daughter would caution 
her husband that he must overlook peculiarities 
and weaknesses. The very study of perfection 
which she herself had kindled and fanned in them 
as the illumination of their lives they would now 
turn upon her as a searchlight of her failings. 

He downstairs would never do that ! She 
could not conceive of his discussing her with any 
human being. Even though he should some day 
desert her, he would never discuss her. 

She had lived so secure in the sense of him 


The White Dawn 


177 


thus standing with her against the world, that it 
was the sheer withdrawal of his strength from 
her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. 
But now she began to ask herself whether his 
protection had failed her. Could he have recog- 
nized the situation without rendering it worse? 
Had he put his arms around her, might she not 
have — struck at him ? Had he laid a finger- 
weight of sympathy on her, would it not have 
left a scar for life? Any words of his, would 
they not have rung in her ears unceasingly? To 
pass it over was as though it had never been — 
was not that his protection? 

She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the 
parlor. She kissed her child in each room and 
she returned and kissed the doctor’s children — 
with memory of their mother; and then she de- 
scended by the rear stairway. 

She set her candle on the table, where earlier 
in the night she had placed the lamp — near the 
manuscript — and she sat down and looked at 
that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he 
placed it there. 

He had made her the gift of his work — dedi- 

N 


178 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

cated to her the triumphs of his toil. It was his 
deep cry to her to share with him his widening 
career and enter with him into the world’s serv- 
ice. She crossed her hands over it awhile, and 
then she left it. 

The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far 
into the darkni^ss of the immense parlor. There 
was an easy chair near her piano and her music. 
After playing when alone, she would often sit 
there and listen to the echoes of those influences 
that come into the soul from music only, — the 
rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner 
beauty. She sat there now quite in darkness and 
closed her eyes; and upon her ear began faintly 
to beat the sad sublime tones of his story. 

One of her delights in growing things on the 
farm had been to watch the youth of the hemp 
— a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If 
the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks 
as by a common impulse swayed southward ; if a 
zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads were 
instantly bowed before the north. West wind 
sent it east and east wind sent it west. 

And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living 


The White Dawn 


179 


world which we sometimes call the field of hu- 
man life in its perpetual summer. It is run 
through by many different laws; governed by 
many distinct forces, each of which strives to 
control it wholly — but never does. Selfishness 
blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things 
seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Gener- 
osity moves across the expanse, and all things are 
seen responsive to what is generous. Place 
yourself where life is lowest and everything like 
an avalanche is rushing to the bottom. Place 
yourself where character is highest, and lo! the 
whole world is but one struggle upward to what 
is high. You see what you care to see, and find 
what you wish to find. 

In his story of the Forest and the Heart he 
had wanted to trace but one law, and he had 
traced it; he had drawn all things together and 
bent them before its majesty: the ancient law of 
Sacrifice. Of old the high sacrificed to the low; 
afterwards the low to the high : once the sacrifice 
of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but 
always in ourselves of the lower to the higher in 
order that, dying, we may live. 


i8o The Bride of the Mistletoe 

With this law he had made his story a story of 
the world. 

The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldaea; 
the candle bore it to ancient Persia ; the cross bore 
it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the dove bore 
it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the 
drum bore it to Buddha; the drinking horn to 
Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and Rome; the 
doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; 
the mistletoe to Britain, — and all brought it to 
Christ, — Christ the latest world-ideal of sacrifice 
that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of all for all. 

The story was for herself, he had said, and for 
himself. 

Himself! Here at last all her pain and wan- 
dering of this night ended : at the bottom of her 
wound where rankled his problem. 

From this problem she had most shrunk and 
into this she now entered : She sacrificed herself 
in him! She laid upon herself his temptation 
and his struggle. 

Taking her candle, she passed back into her 
bedroom and screened it where she had screened 
it before; then went into his bedroom. 


The White Dawn i8i 

She put her wedding ring on again with 
blanched lips. She went to his bedside, and 
drawing to the pillow the chair on which his 
clothes were piled, sat down and laid her face 
over on it; and there in that shrine of feeling 
where speech is formed, but whence it never 
issues, she made her last communion with him: 

^^YoUj to whom I gave my youth and all that 
youth could mean to me; whose children I have 
borne and nurtured at my breast — all of whose 
eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of 
whom I have closed; husband of my girlhood j 
loved as no woman ever loved the man who took 
her home; strength and laughter of his house; 
helper of what is best in me; my defender against 
things in myself that I cannot govern; pathfinder 
of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though 
my hair turn white as driven snow and flesh 
wither to the bone, I shall never cease to be the 
flame that you yourself have kindled. 

But never again to you! Let the stillness of 
nature fall where there must be stillness! Peace 
come with its peace! And the foom which heard 
our whisperings of the nighty let it be the Room of 


i 82 


The Bride of the Mistletoe 


the Silences — the Long Silences! Adieu , cross oj 
living fire that I have so clung to! — Adieu! — 
Adieu ! — Adieu ! — Adieu ! ’’ 

She remained as motionless as though she had 
fallen asleep or would not lift her head until there 
had ebbed out of her life upon his pillow the last 
drop of things that must go. 

She there — her whitening head buried on his 
pillow: it was Life’s Calvary of the Snows. 

The dawn found her sitting in the darkest 
corner of her room, and there it brightened about 
her desolately. The moment drew near when 
she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meet- 
ing must be over before the children rushed 
downstairs or the servants knocked. 

She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, 
and down each braid the gray told its story 
through the black. And she had brushed it 
frankly away from brow and temples so that the 
contour of her head — one of nature’s noblest — 
was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the 
women of her land sometimes prepare themselves 
at the ceremony of their baptism into a new life. 


The White Dawn 183 

She had put on a plain night-dress, and her 
face and shoulders rising out of this had the 
austerity of marble — exempt not from ruin, but 
exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down 
at her wrists once and made a little instinctive 
movement with her fingers as if to hide them 
under the sleeves. 

Then she approached the bed. As she did so, 
she turned back midway and quickly stretched 
her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it. 
Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him 
in her eyes — the look of the rejected. 

So she stood an instant and then she reclined 
on the edge of the bed, resting on one elbow and 
looking down at him. 

For years her first words to him on this day 
had been the world’s best greeting: 

“A Merry Christmas!” 

She tried to summon the words to her lips and 
have them ready. 

At the pressure of her body on the bed he 
opened his eyes and instantly looked to see what 
the whole truth was: how she had come out of 
it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what 


184 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

their future would be worth. But at the sight of 
her so changed — something so gone out of her 
forever — with a quick cry he reached his arms 
for her. She struggled to get away from him; 
but he, winding his arms shelteringly about the 
youth-shorn head, drew her face close down 
against his face. She caught at one of the braids 
of her hair and threw it across her eyes, and then 
silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her. 
The torrent of her tears raining down into his 
tears. 

Tears not for Life’s faults but for Life when 
there are no faults. They locked in each other’s 
arms — trying to save each other on Nature’s 
vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea. 

The rush of children’s feet was heard in the 
hall and there was smothered laughter at the 
door and the soft turning of the knob. 

It was Christmas Morning. 

The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold 
threw it forward over the gladness of the Shield. 
The farmhouse — such as the poet had sung of 
when he could not help singing of American 


The White Dawn 


185 


home life — looked out from under its winter 
roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller who 
laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders. 
Smoke poured out of its chimneys, bespeaking 
brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak tree be- 
side it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing. 
Soon after sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet 
wings, rising out of the snow-bowed shrubbery, 
flew up to a topmost twig of the oak ; and sitting 
there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned 
for a little while that landscape of ice. It was 
beyond its intelligence to understand how nature 
could create it for Summer and then take Summer 
away. Its wisdom could only have ended in 
wonderment that a sun so true could shine on a 
world so false. 

Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping 
porches and shovelling paths. After breakfast a 
heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with fire- 
side warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves 
or overcoat, rushed out of the front door pursued 
by a little soldier sternly booted and capped and 
gloved; and the two snowballed each other, 
going at it furiously. Watching them through a 


1 86 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

window a little girl, dancing a dreamy measure of 
her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to 
some one to come and look — beckoned in vain. 

All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius ; 
all day the little girl played with the doll — hugged 
to her breast the symbol of ancient sacrifice, the 
emblem of the world’s new mercy. Along the 
turnpike sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither 
by rushing horses; and the shouts of young men 
on fire to their marrow went echoing across the 
shining valleys. 

Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas 
Day ! 

One thing about the house stood in tragic aloof- 
ness from its surroundings; just outside the bed- 
room window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered 
with snow except where a bough had been broken 
off for decorating the house; here owing to the 
steepness the snow slid off. The spot looked like 
a wound in the side of the Divine purity, and across 
this open wound the tree had hung its rosary- 
beads never to be told by Sorrow’s fingers. 

The sun set golden and gathering up its last gold 
threw it backward across the sadness of the Shield. 


The White Dawn 


187 


One by one the stars came back to their faithful 
places above the silence and the whiteness. A 
swinging lamp was lighted on the front porch and 
its rays fell on little round mats of snow stamped 
off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost 
a low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome 
good neighbors; and between those beacons soon 
they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and 
children assembling for the party. 

Late into the night the party lasted. 

The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their 
Forest Memories went to ashes. Bodily comfort 
there was and good-will and good wishes and the 
robust sensible making the best of what is best on 
the surface of our life. And hale eating and 
drinking as old England itself once ate and drank 
at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that 
ever wanted to go faster than the music. 

The chief feature of the revelry was the distri- 
bution of gifts on the Christmas Tree — the hand- 
ing over to this person and to that person of those 
unread lessons of the ages — little mummied 
packages of the lord of time. One thing no one 
noted. Fresh candles had replaced those burnt 


1 88 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

out on the Tree the night before : all the candles 
were white now. 

Revellers ! Revellers ! A crowded canvas ! A 
brilliantly painted scene ! Controlling every- 
thing, controlling herself, the lady of the house: 
hunting out her guests with some grace that 
befitted each ; laughing and talking with the 
doctor; secretly giving most attention to the 
doctor’s wife — faded little sufferer; with strength 
in her to be the American wife and mother in the 
home of the poet’s dream : the spiritual majesty of 
her bridal veil still about her amid life’s snow as it 
never lifts itself from the face of the Jungfrau 
amid the sad most lovely mountains : the American 
wife and mother ! — herself the Jungfrau among 
the world’s women ! 

The last thing before the company broke up took 
place what often takes place there in happy gath- 
erings : the singing of the song of the State which 
is also a song of the Nation — its melody of the 
unfallen home: with sadness enough in it, God 
knows, but with sacredness : she seated at the piano 
— the others upholding her like a living bulwark. 


The White Dawn 


189 

There was another company thronging the 
rooms that no one wot of: those Bodiless Ones 
that often are much more real than the em- 
bodied — the Guests of the Imagination. 

The Memories were there, strolling back and 
forth through the chambers arm and arm with the 
Years : bestowing no cognizance upon that present 
scene nor aware that they were not alone. About 
the Christmas Tree the Wraiths of earlier children 
returned to gambol; and these knew naught of 
those later ones who had strangely come out of 
the unknown to fill their places. Around the 
walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes that 
bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant : 
these were Life’s Pities. Ever and anon they 
would lift their noble veils and look out upon that 
brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and 
relapse into their compassionate vigil. 

But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a soli- 
tary young Shape filled the entire house with her 
presence. As the Memories walked through the 
rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her 
and mutely beckoned her to a place in their 
Sisterhood. The children who had wandered 


190 The Bride of the Mistletoe 

back peeped shyly at her but then with some sure 
instinct of recognition ran to her and threw down 
their gifts, to put their arms around her. And the 
Pities before they left the house that night walked 
past her one by one and each lifted its veil and 
dropped it more softly. 

This was the Shape : 

In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet 
under the chandelier — which had no decoration 
whatsoever — stood an exquisite Spirit of Youth, 
more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet 
most alive ; her lips scarce parted — her skin like 
white hawthorn shadowed by pink — in her eyes the 
modesty of withdrawal from Love — in her heart 
the surrender to it. During those distracting 
hours never did she move nor did her look once 
change : she waiting there — waiting for some one 
to come — waiting. 

Waiting. 


THE END 


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